I am a huge fan of del.icio.us, so I decided to check out their millionth user / birthday bash at the Yahoo campus (many photos here). I had a chance to briefly chat with Stephen Hood (a product manager at del.icio.us), Les Orchard (del.icio.us engineer), Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Salim Ismail (co-founder of PubSub), and Jeremiah Owyang.

You might have heard about a product called Ceiva. Ceiva is a picture frame that plugs into a phone line. Each night it automatically downloads digital photos to the picture frame. It’s a great way to share photos with family members but it costs money. Ceiva charges you for the frame and you need to pay a monthly fee to use the service.

Now there are ways to accomplish almost the same thing using Flickr and a free screen saver that integrates with Flickr. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Open an account with flickr. Both free and pro memberships are available.

2) Upload your family photos to your flickr account.

3) There are two ways that you can identify the photos that you want to share:

- Tag the photos with a special tag name – e.g. “family”, “smithfamily”, etc.

OR

- Set up a Private Group on flickr for your family photos. This option is better if you want your screen saver to include photos from multiple family members.

4) Download the Slickr screensaver. Slickr currently runs on Windows only. Slickr is free but the developer takes donations here. This is a really great free program, so I encourage you to donate!

5) Install Slickr and open Slickr (Settings).

If you tagged photos in step 3, you’ll want to select the “User” option and type in your user name (the name of the user who posted the photos). Then click the “Tags” option and type in the tag name that you used in step 3 – e.g. “family”. You can only enter one tag.

If you are using a Group, select the Group option and type in the group name.

6) There are a couple of other Slickr settings that you might want to adjust:

• Under the Options tab, you can specify the Cache directory (Slickr will download the photos to your hard drive) and the maximum cache size in MB.
• You can also control how many seconds each photo will display, the minimum image size, and you can control various transition effects. You can un-check the “Show logo” option if you don’t want the Slickr logo to appear.

7. To preview your screensaver, run Slickr (Console).

8. When you installed Slickr, it should have set Slickr up as your screen saver. To double check this, go to Settings > Control Panel > Display > Screen Saver and make sure that Slickr is the selected screen saver.

That’s it! When you add more photos to Flickr using the family tag (or when you add photos to the private group), the new photos will show up in the Slickr screen saver. Once you have tested this out yourself, you can send these instructions out to your family members. Make sure to specify the Tag name or Group name when you send out the instructions.

Another tip:

If you have a big-screen TV, hook a laptop up to the TV and run the screen saver on the TV. It looks great!

Update:

If you’re a Mac user, check out Picture Framer. Picture Framer runs in your Dashboard. You can pull in photos from multiple sources, including flickr. The version that I’m running doesn’t allow you to filter by tag or group but you can specify a flickr Set. So if you go this route, you can set up a flickr set dedicated to family photos and use Picture Framer to display those photos.

9/21 Update: 
Here’s another option for Mac users who have iPhoto 6:
KuraFire Network > Flickrlicious Screensavers with iPhoto 6

Thomas Hawk has confirmed that Nick Douglas from Valleywag is indeed the devil.

The Devil Himself, Nick Douglas Hosted on Zooomr

By now, most people have heard about the recently launched Edgeio. If you’re not familiar with Edgeio, here’s a good overview written by TechCrunch guest blogger Nik Cubrilovic. You can also listen to an interview with TechCrunch co-founder Mike Arrington on the Like it Matters blog. I’d really like to see Edgeio succeed but I have some doubts about people’s willingness to clutter their blogs with classified listings. I’ve visited the Edgeio site a few times since they officially launched on Feb. 27 and so far I’m not seeing a huge volume of listings.

Today (March 5, 2006) for all of California I’m seeing: 28 For Sale listings, 3 Autos listings, 4 Wanted listings, 2 Housing listings, 522 Jobs listings, 5 Events listings, 41 Other listings, 192 Services listings, and 2 Podcasts listings.

I know that Edgeio has only been out of beta for a week or so but I was surprised to see such a low number of listings given the amount of buzz that they generated leading up to their launch. I have looked through the faq’s and I can’t help but think that there is too much technical jargon being thrown around – using XML-RPC to claim an RSS enabled web site, ping servers, trackbacks, clustered tagging, etc. In order to gain any kind of critical mass, I think Edgeio will need to make the process of posting items for sale A LOT SIMPLER. People are busy and they just don’t wany to invest a lot of time in figuring out how to post an item for sale. With their current set-up, Edgeio is restricting their selling community to people who have blogs or web sites, and that is just too limiting in my opinion.

In the Mike Arrington interview, he announced that Edgeio will be rolling out new tools that will make the selling process simpler (i.e. sellers will not need to have a blog or a web site). Once those tools are rolled out (in the next couple of weeks according to Arrington) maybe we’ll see the volume of listings go up. As I mentioned earlier, I’d really like to see this succeed because I like the “listings from the edge” concept and I think eBay and craigslist could use some healthy competition. So if you’re a blogger, go sell something on Edgeio!

3/6/2006 Update:

I found an interesting post on Data Mining about Edgeio. The author has been charting the number of listings over time. Included in the post is a detailed response from Edgeio co-founder/CEO Keith Teare. According to Mr. Teare, the number of listings will jump from time to time as larger publishers come on board and listings. He also mentions the upcoming features targeted to non-bloggers.

3/11/2006 Update:

Edgeio has just rolled out a new feature called “Instant Add”. More details on the Edgeio blog.

Filed under: edgeio

I came across this cool Web 2.0 Innovation Map on Google Maps Mania. Zoom into your part of the country to find Web 2.0 sites/services in your area. A couple of weeks ago, I created something similar to this on a much, much smaller scale (SF Bay Area only) on Wayfaring.

It’s good to see Yahoo making some improvements to MyYahoo. They recently added the ability to drag & drop content. This is a standard feature on most of the new AJAX homepages. I’m not so sure where these new home pages (Netvibes, Zoozio, etc.) will be a year from now. I suspect that most of them will either be bought out by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. or will shut down due to a flimsy business model. I haven’t tried all of them but I’ve been very impressed with Protopage. All in all, the proliferation of these Ajax homepages is a good thing because they are pushing the bigger players to add more features, which ultimately benefits the users.

Filed under: Yahoo, Ajax, Homepage

Filed under: Wayfaring, Google Maps