Cutting through the hype and BS, here’s what FlickrFan is: the most bloated mac screensaver you’ll (n)ever download. All of the jabber about Twitter, feeds, uploading to flickr, etc is all just fluff. There are better apps for all of those things, and they actually work better separately than FlickrFan does.
FlickrFan basically downloads a whole bunch of photos (it took about 90 seconds for it to completely saturate my wireless connection) to a folder on your computer and then makes use of Mac’s built-in photo screensaver to display them.
Dave says: “FlickrFan is the next step in really simple content distribution, pictures flowing to your desktop.”
Heh. FlickrFan is a glorified photo downloader.
What’s really great, though, is that the photos aren’t attributed in any way. I don’t know which photos are the AP’s, which photos are from my contacts… nothing. It doesn’t pull in photos that I’ve marked as “favorite” and it doesn’t let me specify sets or tags or anything. (UPDATE: I’ve heard that it can do this, but you have to hunt down the RSS feeds for all of those things and add them separately)
This is a piece of software that could’ve been effectively written in about 45 minutes — which doesn’t make it bad, sometimes simple is better — but after all of the self-fellating (and talk of months of development), I was expecting a little more.
Bottom line, if you want a Flickr screensaver check out Flickrbits — much higher quality stuff there… and they’re not “platforms” whose EULAs (speaking of which, the url that the EULA references generates a nice 404) force you to allow the software to “phone home” to get updates without your permission.
so potentially every user of FlickrFan could be considered a copyright infringer depending on how they set it up to pull feeds.
Seems unlikely, unless you subscribe it to an RSS feed of photos that you don’t have the rights to view… pulling from flickr for personal use is probably fine.
Steven,
Dave got a twitter message from Lane Hartwell asking:
@davewiner: perhaps you could just respect those with ARR on their images and just opt them out. Isn’t that why CC licenses were invented?
He replied:
@lanehartwell, let me have a few days to get educated on these issues. though i’m sure there’s no obvious answer.
Will she send him an invoice? I thought she had her Flickr library locked up.
Jpegs are designed to be internet safe copies of works. The jpeg creator can select the level of quality they wish to “give away”. Automating “rights” management for jpegs is an enhancement request that Dave won’t be able to resolve, IMHO, as he suggests.
Lane Hartwell, Jim Goldstein and Dave Winer are commenting about photo rights at:
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/12/28/flickrfan-a-heads-up-for-license-conscious-flickr-photographers/#comment-21647
Dave is “very busy right now” and that’s not making photographers very happy. Food fight any minute. I tried a comment to see if ARR photos we’re being release in the feed and I found one that is. The software doesn’t read the creators site for a license. If Flickr send a jpg link in a feed it requests a copy of that file. There will be upset people… film at 11. Invoices may start flying soon since this is a “product” with a EULA, etc.
Dave should give this stuff away and never expect to make money with lone scripting. He’s needs legal advice… again.
FlickrFan is a trivial hack that requires a ridiculous amount of software and hardware. It also requires a high-definition television to stay on all the time. Talk about bloated.
If Dave Winer had pitched this as a fun project of little consequence that feeds his love of news photography, rather than as a “revolution,” he wouldn’t be the subject of so much ridicule around the net along with Robert Scoble and the other sycophants. But his ego won’t permit him to do anything that’s less than earth-shaking. Almost feel sorry for him.
I love that the Le Web video of Winer has someone telling him about the Google App that does the same… http://pack.google.com/screensaver.html - he looked a little shocked.
He also took a shot from somebody who thought it was environmentally irresponsible to leave your power-hog HDTV on all the time just to display pictures.
My favorite moment, though, was when he was asked for his greatest online and offline mistakes, couldn’t muster up the humility to come up with anything, and insulted the questioner.
http://portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/393644