A number of spy cam websites have grown in popularity. These sites encourage users to photograph or video persons they find attractive and share those photos and videos online. Other users of the site can then rate these photos and video based on the appearance of the subject.

More often than not, the person who has been photographed is unaware of it. In fact, sites like TubeCrush specifically reject any “staged” photographs. Photo submission guidelines on the website state, “We won’t use any photo that looks like it’s a setup, don’t cheekily try and get your friends on here boys and girls.”

As a result, it may be quite by accident that the subject of such a photograph may come across his own image on the Internet, or worse, may be informed of it by friends or family members who see the photo.

A London commuter recently featured on TubeCrush 

TubeCrush was set up about seven months ago by four youngsters, Steve Motion, Gemma Dean, Andy Kaufman and Michael Sparrow, from South London. The idea emerged while watching a dating quiz show.

So great has been the success of this site that they now have a similar site New York City, called SubwayCrush, and they plan to set up sites in other cities. They have begun to sell branded merchandise online.

Several other social networks are dedicated to helping commuters date other commuters or post messages to find commuters they struck up a conversation with (or even just smiled at). While these sites have been set up without any malicious intent, their ethics are questionable, at best. If a user does not like the idea of his / her photo being circulated and rated on the Web, a removal request option is usually available. However, for users who are unaware that they were even photographed, this isn’t much use.

Transport for London says that since the London Underground is a public area, taking photographs of people is legal.

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.

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/