Via Steve Rubel, the news that CNet has rolled out their own photo-sharing service (hot on the heels of Yahoo, who launched theirs last week) as a spinoff of their Webshots division. Shoebox does something a bit different from the usual photo-sharing fare, in that it's acting as a sort of "meta-bookmark" service that can pull in images from anywhere around the web to store, tag and share. It'll scrape a page of images, or you can submit RSS feeds as a "source" for new photos, and bookmark/store individual images from out of the stream of images. Any photo can be shared via email, plus you can browse photos by tag, by user, and by recently added images as with other photo folksonomies. What's uber-cool is the ability to totally remix and mashup your shoebox collection by using a combination of photo source selection and tag filters, and then get an RSS feed of the result. This would make it easy to generate a feed of your top 5 favorite Flickr groups all rolled into a single feed, for example. This kind of recombinant feeding promises to be pretty fun, and I'll look forward to seeing what folks come up with. I also think the "source agnostic" approach to bookmarking photos found anywhere is a valuable idea — as Steve Rubel quipped, it's like "When del.icio.us Met Flickr," and the result could be some excellent synergy.









1. Cool. I have yet to figure out how to make a direct link to my contact's photos as the URL is generic to the logged in user.
So I'll use this to scrape all my contacts photos and link to it .......
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Ted Rheingold