Progress on FlickrRivr

Sunday, April 15, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I've made a lot of progress in the last 24 hours on the packaging of FlickrRivr.  

To summarize, it's a desktop application that subscribes to one or more feeds from Flickr, and deposits them in a folder of your choosing. Then you can configure iTunes to synch from that folder to AppleTV, so you can see pictures of your Flickr friends automatically updated on the screen of your TV. You can of course also configure your Mac's screen saver to run off this folder, for the same effect on your laptop or desktop computer. 

I've got the configuration part working now, before I had the aggregator working and it's been running on my home entertainment center for over a year. People find it fascinating. Me too. 

Now I've hit some stumbling blocks, no deal-stoppers, but I thought maybe I could open this up so that people who read the site can help search for what I'm hoping to find. 

Yahoo has lots of RSS feeds, and they even have feeds with news photos. Very cool, except the photos are low resolution, too low to be good for this application. Seems a shame, because in between pictures of Irina and Valerie, Scoble and Justin, and everyone's cats and grandparents, it would also be great to mix in pictures of Gonzalez and Imus, Sharpton and McCain. A bit of Edwards and Clinton wouldn't hurt. Obama and Blitzer. Cheney. Ahmadinajad. The Dear Leader. The Great Wall of China. Tony Soprano. 

And the feeds don't have to be from Yahoo. If you know of other sources of news photos in RSS, I can use more examples, more stuff to preconfigure FlickrRivr. If bandwidth is an issue, I don't mind mirroring the feeds and photos on my server. I don't think there will be so many users as to make bandwidth a serious issue. 

Anyway, if you have any ideas, please let me know.  

PS: I know this is realllly low-tech. All of the good stuff is. But I'd be willing to bet this is as big as blogging or podcasting. A major application for our networks. It's that compelling.  

PPS: The guy on the left in the cowboy hat is my maternal grandfather, Rudy Kiesler. Here's the full picture.