Category Archives: Web 2.0

Create a dynamic family photo screen saver

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.

Slickr

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

Slickr

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

1999 called…

In case anyone is wondering why I’m being credited with the title of this post on Supr.c.ilio.us, that phrase was from a comment that I made on Techdirt a few days ago…

1999 called, it wants it’s bubble back.

The comment was related to Business Week’s recent cover story hyping Web 2.0 companies.

More on the BusinessWeek article here (BusinessWeek blog) and here (Valleywag: Kevin Rose talks about the cover).

Edgeio – one week after launch

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. 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.

Craig Newmark / Edgeio

Craig Newmark from craigslist brings up some good points about the soon-to-be-launched Edgeio service in the comments section of this post on BuzzMachine. It will be interesting to see how Edgeio deals with these issues. Mr. Newmark’s comments:

…I act as full time customer service rep, there’s a few of us, only a few, because with flagging, our community removes most questionable ads.

Using the tagging approach, how are bogus ads removed? Considering that spam blogs are already a huge problem, and how easy it’ll be to falsely tag viagra ads, the volume of bad ads will be tremendous.

That will also be true of blogs that do things like tagging photos that you’d prefer not to see, but they’d be in search results anyway. (You really don’t want to know.)

Also, how will ads be removed (by the poster) or expired?

When there are other problems, like defamation, how are they handled?

I’m guessing that many customer service reps will be needed, good jobs, but then,
you risk being a “publisher” which means that you have to monitor ads.”