OurDoings Integrates Google Maps With Privacy

(Bruce Lewis) Do you have one of those mobile phones with a built-in GPS and camera? It's probably not only recording when you took a picture, but where. If you upload such a picture, OurDoings will show a map courtesy of Google Maps. If you don't have that kind of cameraphone, you can enter a latitude and longitude on the same page where you edit a photo's caption.

This feature has been in for a couple of weeks. One thing people have noticed is that it's easy to forget to turn off the geocoding option in your phone when you're at home. If you upload a photo with GPS information for a private location, then edit the latitude/longitude, blanking them out, you'll get a button that says "Always Hide This Location". Click that button, and photos uploaded subsequently with approximately that location will have their GPS information erased.

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What Rights to Your Content do the TOS Grant OurDoings? None

(Bruce Lewis) When I was growing up, if you wanted copies of your pictures you brought your negatives to a store and they made them. I never had to sign a contract granting them the right to make copies; I just asked them to make a copy and they did.

How did these stores not get sued? After all, under copyright law only you have the right to make copies of your own pictures. Could it be that by asking them to make a copy, you're granting them the right to make a copy? That's what I figure. And that's why the terms of service I wrote for OurDoings don't say anything about you granting rights to your content.

When you upload photos to OurDoings, we're going to do what a reasonable person would expect a photo-sharing site to do. Am I opening myself up to being sued? I don't think so. I think Facebook's terms are unnecessary.

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OurDoings makes your story read a whole lot better

(Bruce Lewis) Change is exciting, but it happens slowly because humans get stuck in our ways.

Thousands of years ago, Greek writing changed. It was a simple, subtle change, really. Some people just started putting spacing between words. It wasn't entirely new. It had been done in other languages. Butasyoucanseeitmakesabigdifference. The experience of reading is much better thanks to that subtle change.

I bet, though, that scribes who were used to alljammedtogetherstyle scoffed about the new style. It seemed like a waste to leave empty parchment. I imagine them asking, "How hard is it, anyway, to distinguish words without spaces? A lot of people have been doing it for centuries."

We're starting a similar transition in photo sharing. Like the jammed-together words in ancient writing, today's online photo albums jam pictures together. This works fine when people want to look at each picture for its independent artistic value. But that's not what most photo sharing is about these days. People tell stories with their photos. They tell about life with kids, about travels, about projects. Those stories need punctuation, and most online photo sharing doesn't supply it.

Want an example? Look at Robert Scoble's photostream. Here's what's good: You immediately notice that Robert is a good photographer, because the format emphasizes the individual photos. But what about the story? On the plus side, you have words identifying each photo. So you do get each individual photo's story. But how do they fit together? They're just a grid. They're not that different from the jammed-together words on ancient parchments.

Robert says anybody can use his photos for anything, so I did. I downloaded thousands of them from Flickr and uploaded them to an OurDoings site. Take a look at it, and scroll on down. Don't you feel like you're reading a story? The pictures are grouped by day. This was done totally automatically; I didn't have to sort them out at all. The groupings and dates give you a sense of what happened when.

Now look again. What words do you see? I didn't type in anything. I could have, but I wanted you to see how much story gets told just by grouping photos. Like adding spaces between words, it's not a huge technological jump. It's just something that makes the story read a whole lot better.

Another pleasure you get from this format is easy access to the archive on the right. Suppose you're looking at Robert's 2009 pictures from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. You wonder if he went last year and what it was like then. OK, so what keyword do you search for to find his old photos? Would he have tagged them Davos? WorldEconomicForum? WEF? Stop! Don't think that way. The World Economic Forum happens the same month every year. You're looking at January 2009. Open 2008, then click January. There you are!

A lot of photos that tell stories work that way. Birthday photos are on the month of your kid's birthday. Baby pictures are found in the months when they were a baby. Christmas pictures can always be found in December. Summer vacation photos might be July, might be August. But you know what I've found? By having convenient access to years worth of family photos organized by month, I now know what month and year all our vacations were in.

Popular desktop programs for organizing photos on your own computer show them grouped by day. For some reason that great idea didn't carry over to the web. Except for OurDoings. It's a shame, too. There are so many stories out there that could read a lot better. For my relatives and close friends I'm willing to slog through a grid of their photos and find the story myself. But for less-close friends, ones I've lost touch with but occasionally wonder about, I'd like to have a format I can skim through and catch up on what's going on with them. Do your friends a favor: Use OurDoings.

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