Month: February 2011

I’ve been a loyal and active Flickr user for years.

If you head over to my Flickr profile you will see that I have something like 8k photos on their service. Much of them have been tagged too.

For me, I use Flickr to store all of the photos I want to save forever. I put a small subset of those photos on Tumblr to share a particular moment.

Flickr was one of the first web 2.0 communities and I always appreciated their API and the idea that photos are part of a stream (as opposed to albums).

But Flickr isn’t doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that outloud.

The iPhone app is sluggish. The latest UI fresh is still way to cluttered and the public vs private dials are clunky. I’ve also read a few stories about people losing photos on Flickr which doesn’t make me feel any better.

Zillions of folks have switched to Facebook over the years for photos but it’s not me either. I don’t like my personal photos showing up next to odd ads and full disclosure I don’t fully grok the public vs private settings on FB either. Also I’ve taken great pains to make Facebook work for me by limiting it to less than a 100 friends and there are times where I want to share my photos with the world.

So I want the next version of Flickr. I’ll take it from yahoo or some awesome startup. I want it clean and simple, like a photo version of Vimeo. And I’d like the mobile version to feel fast and awesome.

Who’s working on that?

There are lots of folks that are enjoying the benefits of google’s priority inbox.

They say that once you train it, it works well.

That reminds me of the old days of speech recognition. Train the system and then it gets better.

I never cared for those old days of speech reco. Instead I like it and use things when they just work. The speech reco in Android is like that. It’s practically magical. And it doesn’t require me to train it in anyway.

The best version of Priority Inbox for Gmail users right now is Sanebox. I am not an investor but it’s built by my good friend Stu Roseman. It’s infinitely better than Google own priority inbox. It requires no training to get going and it just works. I haven’t checked email for the past week while I’ve been on vacation. Re-entry is going to be a bitch but I know it will be manageable because of Sanebox.

But perhaps the most important version of “priority inbox” is actually outside of my gmail altogether.

The most intimate and important network i belonged to was powered by SMS. The most important messages were sent to me via sms.

But as I wrote last month my love affair with sms is reaching an end. (http://bijansabet.com/post/2825963167/my-love-affair-with-sms-may-come-to-an-end)

And since I wrote that post it’s increasingly the case that I’m moving away from SMS.

My most intimate and important inbox and is now powered by Kik. Kik runs on iOS and Android. Many of my family members and dear friends are on Kik and so are my closes business associates.

Unlike SMS, Kik messages make it to their final destination every time. I can also tell if someone has read my message as well on Kik. And Kik is super fast.

On this particular trip I left my Verizon iPhone behind since it can’t roam at this location. you can’t forward SMS but I did install Kik on my AT&T iPhone so I’m able to deal with anything important.

Email finally feels like it’s put in it’s proper place. It’s a tool not a prison. Thanks to Sanebox and Kik for making my work and personal life better.

(pls excuse typos and lack of links. wrote this on my phone)