Photos

Facebook reportedly yanked an image of Nirvana’s album cover but today when we checked the fan page for the band, the profile picture was back up.

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Photo tagging has gotten easier on Facebook, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time: the site averages 100 million tags per day.

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Earlier this week at SXSW, Animoto announced the launch of their new Facebook application. Animoto is a really slick photo-video montage creation tool that integrates audio and smooth motion effects that move to the beat of the song you choose. I use Animoto anytime I’m in need of displaying a photo montage on my websites because it instantly adds a professional touch.

The new Facebook application enables you to instantly select photos from your existing Facebook albums. The one downfall of this application is that the videos are limited to 30 seconds unless you register at the main Animoto website. I’ve registered previously and it’s well worth it. While I think this may provide users with an incentive to their website, I think it would be better just to unlock it or try to charge a small fee for longer videos.

One of the best features of this application is an existing library of high quality music clips that can overlay your videos. The ultimate aim is to also provide musicians with a way to virally spread their music. One other feature announced just yesterday is one click publishing for YouTube. Unfortunately that feature is not currently included in the Facebook application but being able to display the slick video slideshows on your profile is really great.

I would like to be able to embed the videos on my website as well from the Facebook application but that feature is not included. If you would like to experience Animoto’s complete feature set, I highly recommend signing up for their main website. If you would like to integrate the videos into your profile, go grab the Animoto Videos application.

I recently found another very cool application that I’d call under-used given it’s coolness factor. It’s called The Mozer and it makes your profile into a mosaic made up of your friends’ profile pictures.

For those who are not quite sure what exactly a mosaic is, I’ve provided a low-resolution copy of my own (to protect the hundreds of innocent faces who I claim to associate with). I’m the one on the right.

The application is completely easy to use. It makes a mosaic out of whatever picture your profile picture happens to be at that time, so there’s no limit to what you can Moze.

Mozer takes a minute or so to do its thing. It then shows you a high-res version of your mosaic and lets you zoom in all the way to the natural size of the profile pictures of the contacts making up your mosaic.

You can download the high-res copy if you invite 20 friends, or medium-resolution if you only want to invite 10, but that’s crazy.

It also shows you the mosaics created for all of your contacts who have also been “Mozed”.

I’ve asked them to start selling posters. Let’s hope they comply!

- Jonathan Kleiman runs a law blog called LegalIntellects.com and networks professionally on Probook.ca

Joe Tan has developed a pretty slick plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily insert your Facebook pictures directly into your blog. Once you configure the plugin, all of your pictures are displayed in a convenient photos tab when writing or modifying posts. Also, when selecting a photo from the photo tab, you are provided an option of choosing the small, medium, or large version of your picture. In addition to your personal Facebook pictures that you have uploaded, you can also select images that you have been tagged in. This is the first WordPress-Facebook plugin that I have seen and it has been developed pretty well. If you want to grab the plugin for your personal blog, go grab the Facebook Photos plugin for WordPress.

I received an email yesterday from someone telling me about this new application that lets you share your photos as puzzles. To be honest, the concept is a really great one. Grab your Facebook pics and turn them into a puzzle. For those that like spending their down time messing with random applications, this is definitely one that can suck up a few hours. The only problem with the application is that it is not directly integrated into your Facebook photo gallery. The application is developed by the people over at TheBroth.com. TheBroth is apparently an online community for artists similar to DeviantArt.com. While the concept is good, there is a little more work that needs to go into it. If you are interested in making your own custom puzzles on your Facebook profile, go check out Puzzlebee.

Want your friend’s and your Facebook photos to be displayed on your screensaver? Look no further. Mark Johns has developed an insanely slick desktop application that automatically grabs selected friends’ photos and places them directly in your screen saver. The only restriction is that you have a Mac operating system. While many people won’t be able to take advantage of this application, it will surely inspire some PC developers to create a similar application (or at least I hope so). I have to be honest, this looks like one of the slickest applications that I have seen yet. If this is any sign of things to come, we are in for an amazing ride. If you have a Mac and want to have a Facebook screensaver, go grab the Friend Photos Screensaver application.

Remember all the hype surrounding mobile blogging a couple years back? No? Well there was and now it’s back! Thanks to Mojungle you can share your life in real-time with your cell phone. All of your pictures will show up on your Facebook profile. The mojungle player is pretty slick and a great application if you want to easily share your mobile pictures with your friends. If you want to get in on the moblogging action go check out the application. Be careful though because it’s a mojungle out there!

Want a slick way for placing photos directly into your profile? Scrapblog offers a service that allows you to make sleek flash presentations of your pictures right from your profile. You can import your Facebook photos and mix them with videos, audio, text and other creative elements to create multimedia scrapbooks. This is a similar offering that is provided by SplashCast who also offers a Facebook application. Unfortunately for SplashCast, their application has not been as rapidly adopted. If you want a quick and easy way to make a pretty picture presentation (say that three times fast), then go check out the Scrapblog application.

We already covered a Flickr application on this site but it seems like there are many more people that are taking a shot at launching their own version of a Flickr application. As Mashable covered this morning, Dustin Mierau of Stanford has launched a Facebook application that you can check out here. The Flickr application that was featured on Mashable this morning is very similar to the previous application that we featured on this blog.

Another Flickr application launched today is called zuPort: Flickr. zuPort helps mashup your existing photo album with your existing Facebook album. This enables visitors to see all of your photos in one spot. If you would like to add zuPort then go grab the application.

Unfortunately, none of these applications are the official Flickr application. I have a feeling that this will increasingly become an issue. As developers race to develop the latest version of an application for other open source/web 2.0 sites, there will be a number of similar applications that will appear making it difficult to determine which is the best or which is the official application. I’m sure that someone will soon find a way to effectively aggregate all of the Facebook applications and determine which ones are the best.