Keeping your photos close
| Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 | --Sean |
Ahem...*shakes off the cobwebs*. Sorry for the hiatus, folks. Things have been a bit busy at work.
You know who else is also busy at work? The Flickr team. Every time you take a look around, they've got some cool new feature nestled into their site. In fact, this one even explicitly deals with "looking around", in the sense that, if you find an interesting photo, you might be curious about what other picturesque moments have taken place nearby. The Flickr API had introduced this concept with its ability to process queries by distance, but Nearby takes it one step further by actually turning it into a usable, and awesome, tool. (executive summary available here)
One of the things I like most about Nearby is all of the knobs that it exposes. You can capture really interesting slices by opening up the filters and narrowing in on things like chronologically ordered photos taken near Stanford Stadium on September 16, 2006 (the first game in the new stadium vs. Navy) or the most interesting photos of President Obama's Inauguration. Or you can expand out a bit and see the all-time most interesting photos taken near the Eiffel Tower (except, this time, in Vegas) -- apparently the Bellagio has a pretty glass ceiling. The Flickr Dev blog link above also demonstrates a few cool latitude/longitude tricks, which theoretically makes it a bit easier to pull up Nearby information than finding a geotagged photo and appending /nearby to the URL, though you probably need a pretty good GPS system.
Altogether, Nearby is just one more awesome way to do the thing...well, nearest and dearest to Flickr's heart: explore spectacular photos.