Javascript is a core part of web experience today.  In fact, I’d say that, on the desktop in the full browser front, if your browser doesn’t support at least HTML 4, javascript, and CSS 2, you’re not playing with the right tools.  After all, we expect that people can parse HTML, why not expect that javascript is a pre-requisite for web usage?

Some of us go to great pains to make sure our sites work should a user have javascript disabled.  But I’m actually considering the opposite: hiding certain critical elements if you don’t have javascript enabled to ensure that each visitor is on an even playing field.  Wrapping submit buttons in jQuery’s append() method, submitting data on click(), and plentifully exchanging JSON data via AJAX throughout ought to properly cripple participation of those who opt out of script execution on my site.

It all comes down to this: if you want your site to reach the widest audience possible, you need to anticipate that the client may not allow you scripting capability.  Conversely, on our intranet, and maybe one day on my websites, I’m doing the opposite: if you want to use the site, you’ve got to enable javascript: if you don’t, well… your loss.

All goddamned day I’ve been getting this goddamned whale on Twitter. I’ve also been trying to change the background of my stream, but although it always reports successful (when it doesn’t fail due to capacity problems), it never changes. It either replaces my background with nothing, or it uses the background I had three or four changes ago. God damn it, Twitter, get your goddamned act together!

Honestly, if Facebook doesn’t introduce AJAX-y live update goodness to their homepage, I suspect I’ll use Facebook about 11% as much as I used to.

First, snag your Twitter user id.  Then, open up your theme file.  I put mine in sidebar.php found in /wp-content/themes/<THEMENAME>/.    Use the below code.  If you want the output wrapped in a list, you would need to put <ul> and <li> tags around this code.

Carefully set your variables.  The cache file should be writable.  Note that you can use a decimal value for $tw_BlankAfter and $tw_Minutes if necessary.   That’s it.

Due to what must be a bug in WordPress, please ignore the closing “</text></created_at>” at the end of this post.  It’s trying be smart and “fix” broken tags, but the code is right.

NOTE (2/20/09): I have updated the below code.  The new version can be found at “Posting Your Latest Tweet in WordPress“.

/* ~~~~ Custom Twitter Bit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */
/* ~~~~ Adam S, firsttube.com, twitter @sethadam1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */
 
$tw_File = '/path/to/a/static/writable/file/twitter.html';
$tw_Userid='XXXXXXX'; //set to your Twitter user id
$tw_BlankAfter = 30; //blank out status if it's older than this many days
$tw_Minutes = 10; //minutes between reloads
 
$tw_Offset = FALSE; //leave as is
// uncomment below time if you want to allow a manual reset via ?twitter-reset
// if($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']=='twitter-reset') { $tw_Offset=0; } 
 
/* Do not edit below this line */
if(filemtime($tw_File)>time()-floatval($tw_Offset)) {
	include $tw_File;
} else {
	if(is_writable($tw_File)) { $tw_iswritable=1; }
	$tw_time = (86400*floatval($tw_BlankAfter));
	if($tw_Offset) { $tw_time=$tw_Offset; }
	$tw_hyperlinks = true;
	$tw_c = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($tw_c, CURLOPT_URL,
		"http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/"
		.intval($tw_Userid).".xml");
	curl_setopt($tw_c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$tw_src = curl_exec($tw_c);
	curl_close($tw_c);
	preg_match('/(.*)< \/created_at>/', $tw_src, $tw_d);
	if(strtotime($tw_d[1]) > time()-$tw_time) {
		preg_match('/(.*)< \/text>/', $tw_src, $tw_m);
		$tw_status = htmlentities(str_replace("&","&",$tw_m[1]));
		if( $tw_hyperlinks ) {
			$tw_status = ereg_replace(
			"[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]",
			"<a href="\">\\0</a>",
			$tw_status);
		}
		$tw_output = $tw_status;
	} else {
		if($tw_iswritable==1) {file_put_contents($tw_File,''); }
	} 
 
	if($tw_iswritable==1) { file_put_contents($tw_File,$tw_output); }
	echo $tw_output;
}
/* ~~~ /Custom Twitter Bit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */

Please note that portions of this code come from the twtter_status() function that was not written by me, but is available from various sources online.

Update: Removed function and put code inline.

I’ve even tossed around using another blog engine and just migrating my data, but then, where would I play?

My primary goal, though, for firsttube.com 10, will be a radically simpler and more attractive interface. I like some Web 2.0 mainstays. Expect larger text, brighter colors, AJAX where appropriate, and simplicity. My new comments page, which I’ve been playing with, is already stripped down and already kind of overwhelming. So back to the drawing board, it appears. Stay tuned for more updates than necessary.

But alas, I use Opera, and strangely, this version doesn’t play well. Many links flat out don’t work, there’s weird Flash that Flashblock blocks with every page load, and worst yet, the thing is actually parsing A LOT incorrectly. Check out the below screenshot, and be sure to click on it for the full size version.

Not too long ago, Slashdot started overhauling their incredibly horrendous HTML and rewriting in mostly compliant HTML. The goal of the rewrite, amongst many other things, such as incredible bandwidth savings, was to support stylesheets and graceful degrade. When all was ready, Slashdot held a contest to solicit new stylesheets and received tons of submissions, some really cool and others really ugly, and chose a very nice, very reserved, very modern-but-conservative one as their new default style.

Let’s back up a bit: Slashdot is written in Perl – ack! – and is built upon an open source system called, simply enough, “Slash.” Slash code is horrendously out-of-date and the last download is pathetically old. In fact, the only way to get Slash in any recent form is via CVS access. Slash requires mod_perl and tons of Apache and perl customization. Since Slash is tried-and-true, it’s not really “new” code. And it shows in many ways.

Not too long ago, the Slash folks started realizing that new technologies and new sites were introducing amazing interactive features. Perhaps they realized when a chunk of their userbase got fed up and left for sites like Digg, Techcrunch, Mixx, or some other aggregation type site. Nonetheless, the Slash team started hacking in features that emulated many of the Web 2.0 sites. First it was tagging. “Taggging” has been in beta for some time now. It allows users to arbitrarily tag a story with keywords. The FAQ says that once enough people use a tag, it shows up as a suggestion for others. But I always see weird tags suggested. Either way, it’s pointless, because I don’t know what good tagging does for me.

Then came the “firehose.” The Firehouse is essentially Slashdot’s answer to Digg. The diea is this: users submit stories, links, bookmarks, journal entries, etc, and other users vote on the stories. As the stories get “warmer,” or redder, the entries because available to the editors to convert into real news items. Neat, huh? The idea is cool, except the interface is nowhere near as dynamic or alive as Digg’s, and the content doesn’t rotate as fast. And the load time hurts. So I never use it.

In the last 6 months to a year, Slashdot began rolling out “D2,” their new dynamic discussion system. It is a replacement for the static comment system of days past. The problem is multi-fold, however. Firstly, the layout is a screaming nightmare. There is so much whitespace and what is there is totally overwhelming. Big garish buttons take the place of links or real buttons. Dynamically fetched text takes many seconds to load, even generic insertions like a comment form takes 5 seconds plus to appear. Slashdot has become flat out slow. And D2, which should have remedied a lot of that, has not lived up to its promise.

All the places where things got dynamic on the site feels like a new paradigm being smashed into old code. I wonder if Slashdot might be better off rewriting the entire engine as version 3.0. I know that sounds scary, but when OSNews was starting to feel the pain, we ditched the entire front end and rewrote it – every single line of PHP and HTML and CSS and JS. A combination of creative time-based caching, caching on request, and sleek, optimized queries resulted in a snappy and very responsive front end with smooth ajax integration, a super fast loading page (minus the ads, subscribe today!), and a zero lag experience. The differences between the v3 backend and v4? None. If you exclude new features we built in (news tags, extended user preferences, and conversations), the backend is exactly the same.

Slashdot’s database likely won’t have to be dumped or modified at all to rewrite all of their Perl and Javascript/Ajax. But it might result in a faster, smoother, nicer looking front end. It’s time to reel in the speed issues – the entire site takes forever to load (a 200K front page plus externals doesn’t help). It’s time to fix the ajaxian display weirdness. It’s time to get your JS working well in Opera. Fix those and then perhaps we can deal with the elitist userbase.

Google has a lot going for it. For one, it seems everyone who uses it raves about it. Also, the iPhone interface is integrated with all the other Google services I use, Picasa Web, Gmail, etc.

This all came about because I wanted to use a desktop RSS reader at home and sync it with my web interface for work and iPhone, but that doesn’t exist unless I use Newsgator. Bloglines and Google both appear to have a sync API, but neither Vienna nor NetNewsWire (nor any other client I could find) actually syncs back to them.

But it appears Vienna is working on one for Google’s reader, and with the Bloglines beta looming, it seemed like a good enough time to make the jump. So I did.

Google’s Reader is awfully attractive, but it’s really keyboard driven. Not only that, but there’s no way to have it mark all items as read as you click a feed. You must begin the tedious task of scrolling through every single item, or hitting “j”, “j”, “j”. And YouTube embeds don’t go away – at least in Opera 9.22 – they just wait at the top of the reading pane, obstructing text, until I click a new feed.

Did I mention that Google Reader is slow slow slow? I can click a link and watch it “Loading…” for several seconds. Opera is a second class citizen in Google-land, which is why all new Gmail features don’t work (v2, label colors, AIM) and Picasa support is flaky, but I think Reader fits in that boat too. It’s painful.

So, after 4 full days, I bailed. I’m back to Bloglines classic. I’d love to tweak the stylesheet a little, but it works and it’s so much faster. I’m pretty pleased with Bloglines, especially now that I’ve had a chance to experience something else.

Reddit really let me down. These days, it’s mostly XKCD comics, snarky images, Ron Paul stories, anti-Reddiquette polls, pro-Atheism articles, a mash of comments complaining about subreddits, and most disturbingly, a real anti-Israel swing. It’s not that I’m anti-Atheism (I’m definitely not) or pro-Israel (because I’m really not), but the absolute anger the redditors have for Israel and religion is not only a little scary, it’s also unquestionable. If you do question it, and you will be modded down – silenced, if not mocked. This serves not only to stifle good conversation, it drives the opposing views away until everyone is just verbally masturbating each other.

There is a bandwagon that travels from story to story, and when I read comment after comment about how bad PHP is, but only about 5 comments have any substance, I realize I’m probably dealing with a mix that includes several 15 year olds in there. Recently, I was modded down for a technical comment about an injection attack. An idiot responder suggested I had used improperly with a smarmy quip, when in fact, I hadn’t. Unfortunately, his fellow redditors must have enjoyed his turn, since they proceeded to deal me a heavy negative score. That’s when I started realizing that Reddit has not only become boring and repetitive for me, but it’s not even close to a valid news source anymore. In fact, it’s barely even entertaining: the news moves at a snail’s pace, it’s always behind Digg, and its search facility is so busted that unless I specifically save an article, it’s a hopeless reference site. So I deleted my entire account straight away.

This is not to say that Reddit is entirely bad, because it’s not. Actually, there are several really insightful people on the site, but I rarely read their comments, either because they don’t post much or the noise ratio is so high they get drowned out. And the actual developers – kn0thing and spez, at least – are really class act guys.

But alas, their community has soured, so I am going to sub in a new site in my bookmarks, maybe techcrunch or techmeme or another site aimed at delivering steady technical news. Although I rarely use it anymore outside of RSS, even Slashdot still has good comments. For me, the Web 2.0-esque social news is getting tired faster than I imagined.

Please note that these views are mine and mine alone and not necessarily indicative of those of OSNews, LLC or the OSNews staff

1. How easy is it to do batch uploads?
2. Are there decent Mac and Windows upload tools?
3. Does it work in all major browsers (Opera and Safari are both important)
4. Will the default display scale to upwards of 2500 photos?
5. How fast does each page load?
6. Is the image scaled down? If so, is the original available?
7. Is it a fly-by-night startup that I can count on to be around?
8. How much does it cost for a pro membership, if anything? What are the benefits?
9. What are my storage requirements?
10. What is my traffic/bandwidth limit, if any?
11. Are there integrated ads?
12. How easy is it for others to access my photos?
13. Is there any sort of privacy?
14. What type of tools exist for me to manage my photos once they are online?
15. Is there some sort of embed/slideshow for my webpages?

I’ve tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results.

PicasaWeb
Picasa Web Albums (hereafter Picasa), obviously, is not fully sufficient for me, which is why I’m looking at other solutions. My problems, although chronicled in exhausting detail on firsttube.com in the past, are numerous. Firstly, and most importantly, no “sub-albums,” which means the number of albums on my page gets uncontrollable very quickly. Secondly, no real privacy: each album can be made “private” which simply gives it a unique key in the URL… in short, security by obscurity. Lastly, the tagging mechanism sucks. Want to tag all photos in an album? Ya can’t! One by one is all they offer, and since I had well over 1300 photos upload when they introduced tags, it was a no-go from the get-go. In addition, Picasa Web doesn’t offer a view count, or a way to mark a photo a “favorite.” Oh yeah, and Google wants to charge me $25 for the same thing that everyone else pays $20 for.

I have had problems getting Picasa to run flawlessly in Opera. It does run properly in Gecko, Webkit, and IE based browsers, however, in Opera, I’ve had issues where the photo refuses to advance after a few clicks. Of course, the entire interface is extremely AJAX heavy, which means that when it does work, at the photo level, at least, it’s about as responsive as you could ask for.

That said, Picasa is far from bad. They have cross platform upload tools. 6GB of space now costs $20, and you know there will not be downtime and your photos won’t go up in smoke because the funding dries up. There are no ads and it’s very easy to find and navigate your albums, even for someone who has never seen Picasa. There is a photo embed and a slideshow embed, the ability to upload video, and even geographical information. Also, you can access the photo’s EXIF data, if it exists.

Picasa also has a great mobile interface, and works like a charm on the iPhone. Google is a great company with fantastic web products, and I do believe that eventually, this app will be a powerhouse, but for now, it’s nice, but far from perfect.

Flickr
Flickr is the original daddy of online photos, and owned by Yahoo!, which means, like Picasa, your photos aren’t going anywhere. That is, unless Flickr decides to censor your photos. Actually, Flickr is generally very reliable and very heavily used. As a result, Flickr has a large and vibrant community. Flickr’s Groups are as varied as the Internet itself – there are groups for almost anything. Flickr, unlike Picasa, offers a very robust tagging system, and three levels of photo privacy tied to specific access levels which are very easy to manage. Flickr offers batch upload tools outside the web browser, and a complete API is available. As such, there are scores of apps out there that work extremely well. Sadly, the best Flickr/iPhoto plugin is shareware, but it’s hard to hold that against Yahoo!. Free members can store up to 200 photos and now get 100MB of upload bandwidth (5MB per photo) per month. While the images are resized, the full sized originals are only available for subscribers.

Flickr eschews the concept of albums in favor of “sets,” which, like Gmail’s labels, are essentially groups, of which a photo can be a member of more than one. While this is most flexible, it’s also more confusing for the novice and for non-technical folks. Another drawback is that it’s nearly impossible to have a linear view of photos without going through them one at a time, since all photos aren’t necessarily part of a set, and sets may include the same photos as other sets. Another limitation is that free members are limited to 3 sets. This organization is the main reason I left Flickr some time ago, because those unfamiliar with this very modern paradigm (namely, my parents) were perplexed by it.

Flickr also provides the “Organizr,” which is a powerful flash-based photo manager that allows you to perform incredible bulk operations from re-ordering to re-tagging to re-grouping to removing. I also never spotted another service that focused so much on your ability to place a license on each photo.

Overall, Flickr is a great system, and as it has matured, features have become easier to use and tools have become plentiful, and it seems as though everyone I know has a Flickr account. It’s easy to look favorably upon Flickr as their system has proven to work and stand the test of time (well… internet time). Flickr works flawlessly in all browsers and provides numerous access points, making it an excellent all around site.

Zoto
Zoto is an interesting system that has a few years experience under its belt now. Zoto offers something unique: a fully dynamic interface. The entire site: colors and all, is widget based, and the experience utilizes modern technologies. As incredibly cool as the site is, it’s also pretty confusing.

Zoto has opted to integrate a lightbox-like effect for their photo viewing. When you visit a user’s page, clicking on a photo creates a javascript layered pop-up that shows the photo and some basic details, along with the ability to move forward or backward in the photostream. Click on the photo will bring you to that photo’s detail page, which allows you to navigate through the detail pages, but not back to the lightbox view. Confused? It’s not actually as scary in practice, but it does take some getting used to and as you click through, you are viewing URLs like this:

http://www.zoto.com/site/#USR.sethadam1::PAG.lightbox::ORD.date_uploaded::DIR.desc::OFF.0

These URLs don’t link to the same thing you’re viewing, making permalinks a little confusing too.

Zoto offers multi-platform upload tools, however, in practice, the uploads ran very slowly, and via my 4MB/sec broadband, it took me in excess of an hour to get my 32 photos uploaded.

While Zoto has a lot of stickles about it, it also has some really cool positives. Firstly, like the above, Zoto has an open API, and there are third party tools that utilize it. Secondly, for the tech-savvy, the lightbox views and the complex navigation are pretty snazzy, and allow you rapid access to lots of photos with a modern browser. The experience mostly worked for me in all browsers tested – although page refreshing when the Javascript stalls is painful, and virtually every time meant reloading back to my user page and re-tracing my steps.

Zoto’s membership is less than $20 a year, and for that, you get unlimited storage, an ad-free, spam-free, experience, plus some other fun features. Zoto can export to your Flickr account, making it an interesting companion app if Flickr is your secondary or public photo store. Zoto offers “albums” and “album sets,” and even allows you to apply different template themes on a per album basis. Bulk editing tools are present, as are an awesome array of actual photo editing tools, as seen below. Zoto also included the most granular permissions seen to date: by group or by user.

Click picture for a larger view

Zoto is definitely something special, although it’s not ready — for me — to go primetime for my photos. It’s still too slow to load on some screens. To clarify, the page loads very quickly, and then you wait for the “Loading stuff…” message at the top to populate the widgets with content. It’s worth noting that Zoto worked, for me at least, about 3-5 times faster in IE7 than it did in Opera 9.2.

Zooomr
Zooomr — yes, with three o’s — is another neat photo site comparable, more than anything else, to Flickr. The site was founded by Kristopher Tate, but it’s mostly known for its CEO, Thomas Hawk, a San Francisco based blogger and photographer. Hawk had a very public falling-out with Flickr, which may or may not have been staged, he landed at Zooomr. Hawk and Tate orchestrated a major new version of Zooomr, and within minutes of launch – POOF! – server dead. An internet plea went out, and Zoho and Sun Microsystems stepped in to save the day. So I tend to believe that Zooomr is safe, since there are some major players behind them now.

Zooomr is pretty cool. They have the “zipline,” which is a great way to view someone’s photos or even everyone’s photos, if you’re so inclined. There are inline description editing tools, geotagging, and labeling. There is a place to specify details about selling prints of your photos, as well as per-person permissions, Zooomr user or not.

Click picture for a larger view

Zooomr does have ads, but their pro account removes them for $20 a year, but offers little else: you can view an extended zipline… that’s about it. Your photos are featured in more places, which isn’t really a feature, and you get “better support.” Says Zooomr: “While we help everyone as best we can, being a Pro will escalate your issues to the top of our lists.” I emailed Zooomr support about a few questions on Sept 26, over a week ago, and have yet to hear back.

Like some of the other sites, rather than can-belong-to-one-and-only-one albums, Zooomr offers “Smart Sets.” This novel approach allows you to dynamically add to sets. So, for example, I may have a set of all photos tagged “Food,” another set of all photos geo-tagged to one area, another that features my most-viewed photos, another that features a certain person, etc. This is one of the cooler ways to instantly organize.

Zooomr does not have any batch upload tools outside of the browser, and while it can do batch uploads in-browser, you still have to add them one-by-one to the uploader. Certainly, it would be impossible to upload in excess of 1000 photos this way without incredible patience, which makes it a non-starter for me. In short, Zooomr is working just to keep on par with Flickr, but is feature-light. Zooomr, for now, is most compelling as an alternative to the “big” photo companies, a small site managed by some cool contemporaries of ours. But it’s far from offering the best feature pack. Zooomr does offer an attractive and easy to use site, but lacks much of a community outside the “zipline.”

SmugMug
SmugMug is the real deal. Put simply – these guys have their ducks in a row and have built a gorgeous site that does what it should. However, they seem to know it, and unlike all of the other sites reviewed, there is *no* free account on smugmug. After your 14 day trial, it’s pay to play. And it’s not cheap: $40 a year minimum for the standard user, $60/yr for an upgraded “power user” plan, $160/yr for the premium “Pro” plan.

If you can swallow that price tag, SmugMug features everything you’d want to see in a photo-sharing site: a light AJAX-where-appropriate interface, photo rating, albums and sub-albums (called “galleries” and “albums”), per album theming, password protected albums, visibility/privacy without logging in or needing an account, and so much more.

Once you sign up, you can download one of a dozen or more tools for uploading. There are several Windows apps, several Mac apps, and even a Flickr migration tool. They also feature a simple uploader form and a standard form. Their standard in-browser uploader is Java based, so it’s drag and drop, and it uploads flawlessly and quickly. Once your photos are uploaded, you can view your album immediately and begin playing with the huge lists of photo modifications and tools available to you.

The array of configuration options available to the gallery owners is dizzying: password protection, public v. private, indexable by Google, should the gallery be in SmugMug’s site search, will you allow external links, can users view the full size original, should the page hide your name and navigation, can people rank your photos, can your friends and family edit captions, do you allow comments, can people share the photos – and much more, and that’s all PER ALBUM!

For your account, you can organize everything however you like – you can put galleries in any order, albums in any order, photos in any order. You have geotagging, groups, and, unlike most of the other sites, this one really caters to pros, allowing massive photo uploads (up to 12MB for Standard and Power users, 16MB per photo for Pro accounts), high-quality professional printing (none of that grainy Shutterbug nonsense), your own domain name, and individual guest passwords.

SmugMug uses Amazon S3 for a backend, so count your photos as safe. If you’re still nervous, you can have a CD or DVD backup delivered to your house (albeit for a very steep $11/650MB CD or $22/4GB DVD).

SmugMug is, by far and away, the most featureful, controllable, professional site for photo sharing I have experienced. The only problem — which is a biggie – is that for the hobbiest who just wants to store photos of his family events and pictures of his kids and dogs, it’s really expensive compared to the other alternatives. $40 per year is double what the other sites charge, and while you get many more features, that’s a pretty big yearly commitment for just hosting what I could otherwise do on my own website.

Other than the price, SmugMug is the clear winner for features. Anyone could figure it out.

Photobucket
Photobucket is primary known in tech circles for two things: 1. that annoying image when someone has exceeded their bandwidth, and b) hosting all the bullshit sarcastic “look I’m witty!” graphics that pollute MySpace pages. Yet, they offer one of the best features seen yet: FTP upload access. Surprisingly, Photobucket has one of the more complete photo systems out there, and for $20/yr, a pro account not only grants you FTP upload access, it gives you ad-free, high-bandwidth galleries and sub-albums. My biggest complaint, visible immediately, was a deal-breaker right off the bat. My photos could be located at this URL:

http://s238.photobucket.com/albums/ff247/sethadam1/

That’s it. There’s no customization, not even a redirect from photobucket.com/sethadam1. Put simply, the gallery URL is a mess, impossible to remember, and unusable. I couldn’t seriously tell people to check out my photos at “ach tee tee pee colon slash slash ess two three eight dot photobucket dot com slash albums slash eff eff two four seven slash sethadam1.” It would be easier to drive home and burn them a custom photo DVD than to recite that three times.

That aside, photobucket allow pictures and video and accepts uploads via email as well, including your cell phone, which is handy. Photobucket not only allows you to create custom slideshows – a MySpace must – but also custom “remixes,” which are custom compilations created in a Flash environment which can even be set to audio.

There is no community in Photobucket, mostly because you’re side-to-side on the server with photos that say “Happy Hump Day!” in bright pink letters or “Thanks 4 the add, dood!” as a caption with a bunny with a pancake on its head, or something like that. Photobucket is primarily a hosting service for embedded photos, and while it can hold a huge number of pictures, in albums, by the way, it’s really aimed more for people who use pictures elsewhere on the web, not people who store their photo collection online.

Facebook
Facebook is a really cool site. With the addition of Facebook apps, it’s got a really thriving community. It hasn’t been ruined by a large company like Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Google yet, who shut off access, then integrate it with their accounts… yet. It has a great “face-tagging” feature that allows you to label each person, and the photo is dynamically available in their photos as “photos of X.”

While very cool, Facebook requires a login. That means you can’t view my photos at all unless you have a Facebook account. And while it’s nice for showing off some photos, it’s not an online photo album service… in fact, far from it. You can store lots of photos, but there are no photo-specific features and the management tools are non-existent. Surprisingly, there are several tools out there for integrating with Facebook, but don’t be fooled: this is not a real option for an online photo album.  Update: You can view Facebook photos without a login, however, like Picasa Web Albums, you need an obscure URL for each photo album. 

Privacy options are decent though: if someone isn’t logged in, nothing. If they have merely “limited” access to your profile, nothing. If they aren’t your friend, nothing, except if you tagged someone who is their friend, in which case, they can see that photo.

That’s it. Facebook is a non-starter for real photo sharing.

MySpace
MySpace is, aside from being the ugliest and least responsible site on the internet, worthless for photo sharing. Privacy options do include public and private, but all friends see all photos, which can be in albums, but that’s it. No management tools. Comments are allowed. And the site is dead ugly. Avoid using MySpace at all costs.

Seriously, again, MySpace is not a photo-sharing site. It’s just a site that allows you to upload some photos.

Conclusion
It’s very hard to pick a clear winner, so instead, I’ll award a few prizes here. Best of breed goes to SmugMug, and not by a little. SmugMug is everything a real photo hosting site should be, including a plethora of management and privacy tools. The cost is its only, but very legitimate, drawback.

Most accessible goes to Picasa Web Albums. It’s just drop dead simple, but at the expense of features. Tags are really a non-starter, privacy is non-existent, and there is no community around it. But if you just want a simple app — internet accessible photo albums with photos within them — Picasa Web Albums may be for you.

Lastly, the most powerful free experience is easily Flickr. At 200 photos, you’re barely able to show all of Aunt Mable’s 94th birthday, but with the huge, dedicated community there’s always “stuff to do,” and with an affordable yearly price-tag, Flickr may be the best choice for most of the tech-savvy, and even non-tech-savvy enthusiasts.

So what do we see? The font that made it impossible to distinguish bold from normal weight text? Gone. Now we have a beautiful font that makes it very clear which are read and which aren’t. How about the visual indicator of which item you are hovering over? It’s there!

My biggest gripe was that items were only marked read on hover and by a keystroke, just like Google Reader. But what do I see in the teaser for 1.0.3?

Hey-o! Score one for the Bloglines team! Way to utilize reader feedback! Nice work.

The new beta, as far as I’m concerned, is just a second rate Google Reader. In fact, everything about how Bloglines works has been changed to emulate Google Reader.

My primary gripe is this: in the normal Bloglines, you click on a feed and the items are marked read. In the new version, you must scroll past each item and/or click on each item. If I click on a feed with one or two short items, then I click a new feed, those items are not marked “read” and stay in my lefthand sidebar. I do not care to address each item individually, which is what the new system requires.

Also, even if I do scroll over each item, more often than not, the last item is not “marked read” and remains for me to address later.

There are a host of other single key shortcuts, and I do find these useful, but make no mistake about it, these single key shortcuts are “borrowed” directly from Google Reader again.

Most of my gripes with beta 1.0 were not addressed in today’s update. It was hard to click on a feed properly – the linked area was a bit flaky. Each element in the feed bar had a display of “block,” which I think lead the developers to think it would be easer to locate the right feed quickly with your mouse. However, the second part of my complaint was that without underlines in the feedbar on mouseover, there was no way to tell, except via the hand cursor, that you’re on the right link. The UI ought to indicate that you are on an active link via an underline. Since it does not, and still does not, you’re still floating above a huge link sea.

This is only compounded by the fact that the current version uses a simple Arial font, whereas the new uses what I suppose Bloglines thought was a more “Web 2.0″ font, which I think I’m properly id’ing as Trebuchet.

As a result, it’s harder to figure out what means what in the feedbar. Notice that in the example, on the current site, the bolder headlines mean unread items exist. There is a clear number right beside the feed telling you how many items are pending. But in the new Bloglines beta, the bolding is much less noticeable due to the font change and the number of unread items is right justified, which means you can’t easily tell how many are pending when you have a large number of feeds with unread items.

Overall, it’s a very nice start – it’s attractive, it’s got nice drag-n-drog javascript everywhere, it loads in a decent amount of time, and the new customizeable start screen is very cool. But if this is what rolled out as final, I’d probably just move to Google Reader, which is practically the same thing anyway. This is just too much like it and pretty much ditches all the concepts that I *liked* about Bloglines that made it different.

I am blindly loyal to Mac OS X and Gmail. The both of them are huge inspirations to me; they make me productive, I enjoy using them, they work with me and for me rather than as an abrasive but necessary intermediary (like Citrix) or flat out against me (Microsoft Word!) Gmail is so great and so empowering that random people are willing to take time to make ads for it.

I wish I could be that happy with, partnered with, and loyal to all vendors I patronize. Now, that’s delivering a product.