Flickr-storm

Gregor Hochmuth wrote in email:

Having graduated in June, I took some time off to work on my own ideas before work at Google awaits me next year... Today, I'm happy to announce the first release of several projects in that series and I thought you might find it interesting:

flickr-storm -- a better search for Flickr

It uses some special query processing and other built-in magic to look for more than you enter into its search box. For example, a search for "music" will not just look for that word but also for "concert", "band", "ipod" and other related concepts. You can also collect images into a "tray" and download them to your desktop or send a link to other people. Neat for preparing a slide deck and gathering several photos at once.

Flickr-storm is indeed cool, and looks pretty useful. I'm a bit bemused, though, to see an ad for Picasa at the bottom of the page. Seems a bit "in your face" to be using a product based on Yahoo!'s Flickr to promote Google's photo sharing tools.

Flickr has done such a great job of being extensible via its APIs and its policies on photo sharing that it's become the mashup king of the photo world; meanwhile, I hear murmurs from the peanut gallery that Google image search doesn't return images from Flickr anywhere near as well as it returns images from Picasa. Maybe Gregor going to Google with flickr-storm will change that. (If it's true. It's hard to believe that Google would be so foolish, especially when one of Eric Schmidt's strategic filters is "don't fight the internet.")