Finally, at nearly the same market level as Google, another player has stepped in using its own highly recognizable and oft copied brands. Yahoo!‘s Flickr now has the ability to create “long pictures” which is just a fancy way of saying video. Limiting users to 90 seconds, marketed as a creativity enhancer, it is not trying to be a complete replacement to YouTube but with nearly every digital camera on the market today featuring the ability to shoot video, Flickr is easily one of the best “One-stop-shops” in digital imagery and sharing.

So, with the time limit being the major limiter on the Flickr service, I wanted to take a look at the next important factor in online video — quality. Shot on my Kodak EasyShare Z812, which shoots some very pleasant HD sized video, I have here a short and sweet test to compare the two. Handheld and in shoddy light, but with little movement and fine detail in my impeccable facial expression acting, we should see which of the two services handles it better. After shooting the short vignette, I uploaded it straight from the card to the two services without processing. The .MOV file is an MPEG-4 sitting around 37 MB at 1280 x 720 pixels running at 30 fps.

Due to the painfully imbalanced speed of my TimeWarner RoadRunner cable internet, my uploads were peaking out at around 66KB/s, but for the price, it is hard to pass up. Plus, unlike DSL, I don’t get gouged for just having internet access and not standard service as well. However, it TW starts down the path and away from Net Neutrality as it has been feigning, I won’t have a problem switching. So, with that short aside, it took a little over a half hour to upload the video to both services. I ran both uploads in parallel, but interestingly, the Flickr upload finished sooner even though it was started second.

Once uploaded, the Flickr version was available immediately after I had entered in the title, description and tags while YouTube took a bit longer, but not too much. YouTube asks for that information before uploading the video, which may have helped account for the perceived difference in processing time.

I’m sure you’ve played both videos above and can see that the Flickr video is much crisper. Now the original was not as crisp as it could have been, and given better light and a little more distance from the lens (or not bouncing the shot through a mirror) it would have been much better, but the YouTube version is down right soft. Like a down pillow.

The Flickr page just displays the video in the expected style at the uploaded aspect ration and when you go full screen the video stays reasonably crisp with a tasteful UI that fades out after a few seconds. YouTube maintains its cluttered page, and place the video inside the standard player, which for some inexplicable reason is 4:3 and puts black bars on the top and bottom of the video. I guess I get the embedded play idea, but knowing that I didn’t have those bars in my video makes me feel like they changed my movie. Also, going full screen doesn’t extend the video from edge to edge making a black border all around the video. So, not only is it fuzzy, but it could only be worse if they actually went full frame.

The embedded players are essentially the same as are what are on the sites themselves. Flickr uses semi-transparent UI that floats on top of the video, while YouTube maintains the 4:3 aspect ratio and chucks most of the important UI on the bottom edge. There are definitely times when the Flickr interface would get in the way of the actual video, it makes for a cleaner look on the page.

For me, the clutter at the end of the YouTube video which features (hopefully) related material is the final straw. While it make for the occasional interesting find that you wouldn’t normally see, it is usually filled with completely unassociated garbage. It all depends on the type of video, I guess.

So, to end this long winded and probably wholly uninteresting post, while YouTube will maintain its rule due to its ubiquity, I think that for shorter, more personal clips Flickr is the winner. Hands Down.

I would like to note, that in general I’m a big Google lover and generally don’t like Yahoo!, Flickr and some of the other Yahoo! side brands are cleaner products with better offerings. That still won’t make me use them for search or email though.

For those who want to compare the two to the original, here it is (37.1MB – right-click and save as).

 Mind you, my cell phone is worth more than the car I drive to work in. (It’s cheaper to keep it than to get rid of it.) I did sacrifice to get it. I am now chained for the next year and nine months to an uncaring, evil service provider that snoops on my connection for the government and would like to filter it for the entertainment industry.

But, there are times when it is well worth its pound of flesh and I have been know to not pull my laptop from its bag in the evening (gasp!) in favor of the iPhone for couch browsing. Even my beloved Wii couldn’t do that for me…

As and aside to John, Leopard is mostly great. Especially Time Machine. I’ve been using it since day one and it just works. (Although beware of large oft changed files such as Microsoft Entourage email database files and Parallels virtual disks. Exclude them and use a less frequent backup system for those types of files. Also, get a really big hard drive for backup.)

I know I sound like a cheerleader but Apple and the small developers who congregate around them make the best products around. I just don’t see the quality on the windows side. (Why can’t windows work as nicely as an Xbox 360? It boggles my mind.)

Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:13:06 -0500
Subject: Flock / Blogging Browser
From: Nate Kresse
To: Glenn Kauffman

Built on firefox. I hooked it into my WP blog in seconds. Easiest way to blog as far as I can tell. Can hook into your flickr account and drag and drop into your blog post. Fun.

http://www.flock.com/

Nate

Three clicks, a minute of downloading, a drag and drop install and a double-click later (oh yeah, and some relatively painless config) I am writing a new post from within Flock.

So far so good I’d say. My first impressions are pretty good. It seems to be nicely polished for a beta and some nice integration with some of the nicest web apps out there.

There are, however some down sides.

1. Non-OS based spellcheck. I love my spell as you type integration within Safari and my other Apple apps. I’m wishing I had it here too. (It also doesn’t know “blog”, “html” or several other obviously used words…)
2. Creating links seems to require the mouse. I know there has to be another way of creating links, but I think I might be spoiled by the MediaWiki formatting code. No taking my hands off of the keyboard, no odd rollout sheet, no hidden destinations. Sure, formatting code just gets parsed into html and I could just plunk some of that in, but I’m trying to lower personal stumbling blocks that have, in the past, kept me from blogging more often.
3. Lack of organization for saved posts. All I need is a little window so that I can browse through the posts that I’m working on. Maybe with a little status icon. I’m not picky, but it is something MarsEdit does really nicely.

At least I figured out how to set my default search back to google.com. I know both Flickr and del.icio.us are now in the yahoo domain, but that doesn’t mean I like their search engine.

As for RSS, I think I’ll stick to my tried and true NetNewsWire / NewsGator Online combo.

Don’t take my critiques too harshly, I’m using it and will probably continue to use it as long as its free. And that is the real crux of the situation.

Blogged with Flock

Here is a handy (and very pretty) script that will check out your system for signs of some of the most common rootkits. Sure, a clever hacker won’t leave enough traces, but its the dumb ones that seem to do the most damage.

Its a simple install (as long as you have sudo access), an easy run and quite pleasing to look at. I love seeing all of those [ OK ] text icons!

Developer Site: Rootkit Hunter
Download: Root Kit Hunter 1.2.7 [ developer ]