USAToday has published an article about Flickr in today's Money section in which it's mentioned that Yahoo! has deliberately not pushed the promotion of Flickr (and presumably other recent acquisitions).

"The right way to find Flickr is to be invited by a friend, to get plugged into the social network that way," says Bradley Horowitz - the leader of the Technology Development group.

I agree - the technology itself is just the catalyst for people to bond over a common interest (in Flickr's case - digital photos) and it's not always evident at first what that additional value is, or how to describe it via traditional marketing. Being introduced by someone you know is a far more powerful tool - you are more likely to want to look at their contributions, and will be more inclined to add your own for them.

The Firefox-based, social focused browser Flock dropped out a new Developer Release today - bringing the version to v5.1.1. It's available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

My highlights from the Release Notes:

Import from Firefox \ IE \ Opera \ Mozilla - Cookies, Passwords (but no Extensions)
Additional Favorites Sharing - Shadows.com as well as del.icio.us
Flickr Uploader - Drag and Drop into the Shelf to upload
Flicker Photo Browser - Search by Tag, Person, Text
Maps in Topbar - Drag an address and see it mapped
Technorati in Topbar - Direct query of current page into Technorati

This is a very interesting release, the integration with these web services shows the type of rich experience that can be pulled from the APIs available from the content owners.

It does appear to be Yahoo! focused (Flickr \ del.icio.us \ Yahoo! Maps), but that could be from my Firefox import. A first glance through the Options doesn't show me where to change this.

Remember, this is a pre-Beta release and so prone to crash and have issues. To take a look, grab it from here.

Bradley Horowitz, the leader of Yahoo!s Technology Development Group starts his new blog with a bang with a great post discussing how Social Communities form and scale.

He makes some interesting points around how many people actually need to create (1%), how many need to be active (10%) so that all the community benefits.

This quote is especially nice:

"we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product"

He also discussed why products such as Flickr and Launchcast have been successful - through ease of use and 'implicit creation'.

With posts like this one, I'm adding this feed straight into my reader.

The Social RSS reader Rojo unveiled a new look last night, announced on the Rojo blog.

This is my reader of choice, so it took me by surprise seeing these changes - the look is cleaner with new fonts and icons, but it appears at first glance that some of the functionality has been moved.

• The Explore page is gone - replaced by a Today page (It's not clear what this page is showing - is it Read posts, or Tagged ones, or both?)
• The Tag box is replaced by a link (this extra step may discourage tagging - the prime differentiator for Rojo)
• Favicons are moved down to the expanded item
• Permalinks are tied to the Rojo database, not the original source (they are called Rojolinks)

I'm not sure yet if I like the changes - I ditched Bloglines some time ago and fell in love with Rojo's tagging and community features. Tagging is starting to show up elsewhere - Feedlounge uses it to do personal categorization, and if they start to do the community cloud features I may be tempted to switch.

The Rojo Forums have a thread started to discuss these changes.

At Demo '06 this week, a number of companies presented their Web 2.0 \ Social Networking applications.

Yahoo! was there to show off their new Yahoo! Photos application that applies several technologies and features from the Flickr acquisition.

Techcrunch has a good article regarding the upcoming changes, along with some screenshots:

• Ajax interface for Drag and Drop
• Tagging
• Smart albums (based on date or ratings)
• Friends \ Community (presumably using the Yahoo! 360 \  My Web 2.0 features)
• RSS feeds (coming soon according to the developers)
  

What's really interesting is the scale of the audience, Yahoo! states that 30 million unique users access the current service - that's an awful lot of exposure for these technologies and may provide the catalyst for widespread adoption outside of the typical IT users.

I recently became re-acquainted with Netflix - the online DVD rental company. From my previous encounter, I knew about the Ratings and Recommendations and how powerful that could be in predicting your tastes, but now it seems that they have taken a sip from the Social Software kool-aid - a whole set of community features they call Friends.

I'm not sure how recent these changes are but I did get the chance to play with them today as I connected to a friend. I came away impressed, and wondering when we'll start to see such integration in other websites (Yahoo! - I'm looking at you, you've pushed out Ratings and Recommendations broadly over your properties, but haven't tied them together well yet).

Clearly Netflix understands both their audience (we subscribers) and their content (the DVDs) - the Friends page makes the love of movies front and center. The obvious features are the views of your Friends Queues, and movies they've recently rated, but there is much more...

On your Friends page, you can see what movies you rated similarly - both high and low, and this is also presented in a fun little 'Friends Quiz' such as - 'Which one of these did <friend> like?'. On the movies page, anything that links you to your friends adds a purple figure on the bottom right that indicates that someone on your list has done something to that item before. You can push a Suggestion to them and even write a mini-review (called a '2-Cent Review') that's for their eyes only.

All in all, I'm very impressed and will definitely be spending more time exploring Netflix now I have a friend to help guide me.