About a month ago, Flickr decided to block users from sharing certain images on Pinterest. They have created a no-pin code for images on their site. Whenever a person tries to pin an image from their site onto Pinterest they get a message saying, “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

A representative of Flickr confirmed that they are using this code for all “non-public/non-safe page as well as when a user has disabled sharing of their Flickr account.”

Flickr’s strategy is, however, only partly effective as those who wish find a way to get around this restriction can do so quite easily. All they need to do is to download the image and then upload it on Pinterest as their own.

Surrounding the very same issue, Pinterest account owners also became aware that they could be opening themselves up to litigation if they pinned copyrighted images that subsequently started being monetised by Pinterest.

Now, in an attempt to address the issue of copyright infringement and avoid getting into legal tangles, Pinterest has updated some of the terms used on their site.

Earlier, Pinterest’s Terms of Service indicated that they had the right to sell any material posted on their site. Now they claim they never really intended to sell any such material and so they have updated their terms and conditions document and deleted this clause from it.

All Pinterest users received an email this week informing them about the updated terms of the service. The website has also updated the Acceptable Use Policy to ensure that any material that encourages self harm or self abuse is not allowed.

It has also become simpler for anyone to report copyright or trademark infringement on the network.

Pinterest has also clarified that they do not automatically own the material that is posted on their site. However, they do have broad rights to use any material posted there.

It is important for users to remember that they should only post material that hey legally own on Pinterest and not just copy something that belongs to another person or company without receiving permission to do so.

Picnik allows users to edit and share their photos like several other sites, but what is especially significant about them is the fact that unlike the other sites, users of Picnik do not need to download any special software to edit the photos. They can do so directly in the cloud.

At present, Google will not make any changes to Picnik. The entire team of 20 employees will continue to work for Picnik. They will introduce some new features and integrate the service with Google’s existing products in future. Google may incorporate Picnik’s technology into Picasa Albums, which they also own. Google will also continue to support all existing partners of Picnik.

Details regarding the terms of the deal between Google and Picnik are not available at present.  Picnik is currently among the fastest growing photo editing sites and is already integrated with Flickr, SmugMug and some other sites.

Flickr, which is owned by Google’s competitor Yahoo! will most likely discontinue using Picnik as its default photo editor. Why Yahoo! hadn’t acquired Picnik in the first place is not quite known.

Jonathan Sposato, CEO of Picnik has already worked with Google in the past, when he sold PhatBits to them in 2005. He will now be back with Google.

In the recent past, Google has bought over reMail, the email app for iPhone, and a social search startup, Aardvark, in addition to some smaller companies. Maybe, they have decided that the global recession is over and have started spending again.

This landmark has been achieved in just five and a half months since photo number 3 billion was posted on the site, and that in turn was achieved almost 18 months after photo number 2 billion was posted there. This shows that the rate of growth of photos being posted on the site has gone up by over three times what it was between photo numbers 2 billion and 3 billion. While photos number 2 billion and 3 billion are still posted on the site, photo number 1 billion is no longer available.

At the centre of all the hullabaloo thus created over the 4 billionth photo is user Punimoe, who has been receiving a lot of congratulatory messages on uploading photo number 4 billion.

While this growth rate is certainly substantial it is nowhere near to the rate at which the numbers of photos on the popular social network Facebook, are growing. Their unlimited storage space has lured away a lot of users. They had reported having 15 billion photos on their site, way back in April 2009, and are believed to be getting about 2 billion new photos every month since then.

Flickr, which was set up in February 2004 by Vancouver based Ludicorp, and was bought over by Yahoo! in 2005, is still a very popular photo sharing site, but is facing stiff competition from Facebook.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

Twitter users in and around the area started sending eye-witness accounts of the events on a minute by minute basis. Almost 70 – 80 tweets were posted within 5 seconds, and since Twitter has over 6 million users the news was spread really fast.

In fact, even some of the major Television and radio stations such as BBC and CNN used information sent through Twitter and photos posted on Flickr by ordinary citizens who were present at the spot, such as the ones shown above and below here:

Users not only sent out details about the terrorist attack, but also messages asking people to donate blood at the major hospitals, along with the contact numbers to help out in the crisis. Some people also used the site to reassure their near and dear ones about their safety.

Flickr and Twitter were not the only sites used. A new entry was created on Wikipedia, which local users added details to, as they occurred. Somebody else actually pinpointed the location of the buildings where the mayhem in progress on Google Maps.

While the BBC, CNN and every major newspaper has dedicated a lot of space to the events still unfolding in Mumbai, people increasingly seem to turn to user-generated content on sites like Twitter to get the “real”, unfiltered information as it happens.

Important Note: Please remember that these same tools of communication can be used by the terrorists to keep in touch and convey the latest information to each other. Also if citizens post too many details about the rescue operations in progress, the terrorists can benefit from this information, and change their positions or tactics if necessary. Users must therefore exercise caution regarding the information they send out.

Flickr is a photo sharing site that was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. When YouTube was first launched, a lot of people thought it was similar to Flickr except for its video technology. Soon YouTube overtook Flickr in popularity, thanks to its superior video sharing capability. People started preferring YouTube to Flickr as broadband adoption increased and connection speeds improved.

Users like uploading their videos on YouTube. Yahoo! hopes the same behaviour will get users to upload their videos alongside their photographs. The company intended to introduce video to Flickr in May 2007, according to its co-founder Stewart Butterfield. This announcement was repeated in August 2007, but in typical Yahoo! fashion, they are too slow to change for the better and so far nothing has happened.

According to TechCrunch, one of the reasons for this tardiness could be that they are trying to figure out a way to make Flickr video different from other video sharing sites, such as YouTube, so that users can find some novelty in it.

Flickr video is not expected to replace Yahoo! Video. It will be a separate entity. Kakul Srivastav, director of product management at Flickr says “the audience for Flickr is different.” Flickr has always been a photo-sharing site. It has lost a lot of its clients to other video-enabled sites like YouTube and will have to provide something different to win back these customers.

Yahoo! might think they have found some solution and an announcement in this regard is expected soon. Employees at Yahoo! and Flickr are being very tight lipped about all this and are not admitting to anything in spite of the numerous rumors.

However, the general online public probably won’t care. Video on Flickr is destined to be just another feature on a popular photo-sharing site, rather than any competition to YouTube.

This re-launched Go mobile platform from Yahoo! will open the doors to third-party application developers, just like Google’s Android project does. Yahoo! Go is relatively popular… quite a few users have actually downloaded the software onto their mobile phones. Other developers don’t need to convince users to do the same with their applications as well; they can just piggy-back on the Yahoo! platform now.

Download Yahoo! Go

Go 3.0 itself offers some impressive improvements, in the form of a more personalised homepage and an “upgraded user-interface”. The improvements make the entire user experience more conducive to browsing the Internet, or at least the Yahoo! Go-related Internet from a mobile phone. Some of the nicer features we liked were:

• Smooth browsing through Flickr photographs
• Easy integration with Yahoo! Mail
• Quick, free access to local information including traffic and weather

Yahoo! has also been busy developing what it likes to believe will be the next generation of web services, within a social setting. The CEO of the company, Jerry Yang personally attended CES 2008, where he demonstrated a new service that he called “Life with an exclamation point”, which aims to integrate different applications such as email, structured data, tags and other information in a social context and thus help users in multiple facets of their life through advanced technology.

This interface too will be open to third party application integration. Like Facebook, the new service’s homepage will also highlight relevant updates from various connections instead of just showing an inbox. Dan Farber at ZDNet has details and screenshots of the demo system.

As TechCrunch have noted, similar such platforms and strategies have been adopted in the past by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Life!, which sounds eerily similar to Microsoft Live, will really provide anything new or if it will turn out to be just another copy of the same old platforms.

Yahoo! hope the two new offerings will enable their customers to use the Web more productively and more easily. However it will take a while for the complete new social package to be available due to security concerns, which must be addressed first. They expect to see some form of the platform during the year, but full functionality might not be available in 2008.

One hopes that these latest innovations will help to restore Yahoo! to its earlier place of pride vis-à-vis the internet, considering the fact that they used to be the stars of the Internet before Google came and rained on their parade. Share prices of Yahoo! Inc. have taken a beating off late while those of their competitor, Google Inc; have risen significantly, often at Yahoo!’s expense.

Users can currently browse a map of the world and click on the markers to view images from various continents, zoom in on a specific location to find photographs from that place or view a geographic layout of a particular user’s images.

The upgraded application will provide a new, enhanced world map with photo streams, and something called Flickr Places, which would enable one to limit searches to specific locations and see a variety of information deemed relevant to a particular spot upon the globe, be it a city, town, or even a single landmark. Flickr Places will identify 100,000 searchable hotspots from the existing map application, and combine it with the advanced search and new features such as “hot tags”.

The new tool is particularly suitable for travelers to view and share photographs. Visitors to the Yahoo!-owned social media site can filter results on the maps application by group, person or date of the image.

Flickr receives over 40 million visitors each month and hosts more than 2 billion images. Flickr maps can be accessed by clicking on the link below:

http://www.flickr.com/map/

The email being sent out is as follows:

Dear Yahoo! Photos user,

For some time now, we’ve supported two great photo-sharing services, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr – the award-winning photo-sharing community that has been called “completely addictive.”

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, October 18, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT.. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to Flickr or download your original resolution photos back to your computer. All you need to do is give us your decision before we close, after which any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted and no longer accessible. Please give us your decision by Thursday, October 18, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. After that time, any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted. Click here to make your decision, or review a list of our frequently asked questions.

Thanks for being a part of the Web’s largest photo-sharing service – we hope to see you over at Flickr!

The Yahoo! Photos team

The migration process is very simple, requiring just 2 clicks to confirm the desire to migrate the entire account from Yahoo! Photos to Flickr. However, the migration itself is not immediate. Instead, users are directed to their Flickr account, where they’re greeted with a messages that says “Woo! We’re delighted that you’ve decided to move all your photos from Yahoo! Photos to Flickr. We’ve started the import process for you, and we’ll send an email to your emaill address when we’re all done.“