Comments on: Yahoo! Photos: Relaunching

By: fartikus

fartikus — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 20:39:14 +0000

the major sites seemed to be nearing an end to the cycle of providing full dhtml support to their major services. whats next? i haven’t seen a truly new compelling app (that can make a lot of money) for the web stack in some time. i don’t count video – this is binary data and exists outside the web stack.

has the web stack reached its limits? i see types of commerce and interaction in environments like secondlife that are far beyond anything we could wedge into the web stack.

By: Mind Booster Noori

Mind Booster Noori — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 17:30:57 +0000

People talk of the Yahoo! Flickr acquisition, but Yahoo! Photos has many, many more users. So, it is about time to see it get a face lift, which Yahoo! has done, and is rolling out a limited beta release.

Do you really believe in that? I mean, yeah, people talk about Tahoo! Flickr acquisition and yes, Yahoo! Photos has many many more users. So, why is it expectable for them to get the good features of the best one into the most used one, instead of fusing both applications in only one, to get the best and the most used (which is a feature per se, social Web2.0 apps are only worthy having users) into one only application, instead of maintaining two of them? Sorry, but I don’t think that this is a good decision.

By: Brian McCallister

Brian McCallister — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:45:35 +0000

Hhe, I love the minimalistic, pure text, approach they are taking:

RESULT=49 – TCookie invalid
VERSION=2.5

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:24:14 +0000

To clarify a few things: Images “progressively” load, or load on demand.

When you load a page, your scrollbar is long enough for a full page of photos (currently 100 photos make up a “page”), but the thumbnails are only loaded as they are scrolled into view. This makes the experience snappier and more lightweight, because bandwidth use is minimized.

There is no “infinite” scrolling feature on the site at this time, though some investigations were done in this area (and I thought the idea of a single, long-scrolling page would be really cool.) There are a number of browser limitations and other factors which resulted in the current implementation.

The animation effects have practical reasons and are not just strictly eye candy, but I can tell you that I have spent a lot of time just playing with the drag and drop myself, making sure the effects were solid. ;) It has been a lot of fun developing this thing (I’m one of a team of developers on this project); I think the “fun” factor is reflected in the UI and the whole site overall. Given it’s in beta, bugs are being ironed out and features are still being added.