Product Pipeline

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is one of the most interesting and active communities on the web. At its simplest, it is a photo sharing web site. At its most sophisticated, it is an experiment in user-driven taxonomies, a blogging tool, sideshow generator, and communication mechanism.

With a slick and entirely usable interface, along with myriad options and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) support, it can be much more powerful. Users can easily upload photos from their computers, then name and tag them. Once in the system, pictures can be grouped into sets, emailed to friends, or sent to your blog. Flickr was recently bought by Yahoo!, so it is likely to be integrated into Yahoo's various products, e.g., Yahoo! Instant Messenger, My! Yahoo, and, perhaps, Yahoo! Mail. Flickr offers a free, limited account with which users can upload 100 photographs; the Pro Account, at $24.95 a year, has a 2 GB monthly upload limit and unlimited storage. Even if your library has ample space on the web for photos, don't be put off by paying a small fee for Flickr. The storage isn't what is worth buying; the true value is found in the sharing, tagging, and annotating functionality.

For librarians: Flickr can enliven a web site or blog with photos. But pictures aren't just appealing; they can be useful as well. Have a page on your site about your meeting room facilities? A link into a set of photos can inform your users about this space in ways that text cannot. Consider also the marketing possibilities. The La Grange Park Public Library, IL, keeps its users abreast of its new construction project with photos on Flickr (flickr.com/photos/tags/lagrangepark)— I've followed the progress through an RSS feed. Pictures of your library tagged with metadata such as the library's name, zip code, and name of town can give the library an online presence beyond the library's web site.

Jybe is a cute acronym for "Join Your Browser with Everyone." In other words, according to its web site, "Jybe enables you to surf the web in real-time with friends, family, and coworkers." This small Internet Explorer– and Firefox-compatible plug-in allows users to create and join sessions in which they can simultaneously surf. Changes made by any user in a session are apparent to all other participants. The most recent version of Jybe even includes transmitting users' scrolling and real-time typing into text boxes. All of this wouldn't be as useful if Jybe didn't have its handy chat box toward the bottom of the screen.

The installation process puts a toolbar on your browser that contains two options: Create Session and Join Session. The process of starting a Jybe session is quite simple. When the "Create Session" button is clicked, the software prompts users to enter their name, a name for the session, and a password, if desired. The next step is inviting users, which can be accomplished by sending a URL to desired attendees via email or IM, or announcing the name of a session, enabling them to use the "Join Session" button. Jybe supports an unlimited number of users per session.

For librarians: Jybe has serious implications for the way librarians do virtual reference (VR). This small, free download replaces half of the functionality of expensive browser-based VR programs. In fact, the library at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, is using Jybe as a browser-based virtual reference program. There certainly are issues like security, privacy, and plug-in requirements, but Jybe remains an interesting start. Jybe could be used to enhance communication between main and branch libraries as well. When combined with the Internet telephony application Skype (see netConnect, Spring 2005, p. 26), Jybe could make for productive training sessions.

Are the bookmarks on your browser plentiful, disorganized, and generally unlibrarianlike? Del.icio.us (pronounced like "delicious") can help you organize them, share them with others, and find other interesting web sites.

With del.icio.us, rather than saving bookmarks locally on one machine, you can save them on the web to be accessed anywhere. As if this isn't great enough, users can assign any word (or words) to each site, creating their own personal classification system. The site gets even more interesting because there are RSS feeds for each user's bookmarks, user's specific tags, and del.icio.us-wide tags. In other words, I can subscribe to a respected colleague's feeds and keep up-to-date with what she is interested in, or I can subscribe to a feed of only sites that she labels (recipes for instance), or I can subscribe to a feed for the sites that every del.icio.us user tags "recipes." Browsing around del.icio.us will immediately inform you that not everyone thinks like a librarian (but we already knew that, right?). The user-driven taxonomy, also known as a "folksonomy," is chaotic, useful, diverse, dynamic, and wonderful (visit del.icio.us/tag/library for a sample).

For librarians: Adding links to del.icio.us can easily become part of the reference desk routine when one of the posting bookmarklets is used. Once on a page you wish to bookmark, simply click on the "post to del.icio.us" button on its browser. A form pops up and is prefilled with the site's URL. An additional, optional description can be added, as well as desired tags. Del.icio.us can also be a great way for libraries to share interesting content within their organizations and with their patrons. In place of notoriously difficult to maintain lists of links on library web sites, libraries can point their users to the library's page on del.icio.us or, better yet, display their RSS feed seamlessly on the library site.

After a false start in the mid 1990s, ebook readers are back in their second incarnation. Using the much-hyped "electronic ink," this next generation of ebook readers promises a high degree of readability and usability. Many users are reporting that the text looks so crisp on these displays that they first thought they were looking at a sticker on the device.

In fact, the Sony Librié's display (the first commercially available reader to use the much fabled electronic ink) has a revolutionary 170 pixels per inch, which is about double most computer displays. Besides the sharp display, electronic ink gives the device amazing battery life—four AAA batteries last for more than 10,000 page flips. Because of the way the ink works, the machine only uses battery power to change what is displayed.

Good battery life and a phenomenal display can't save Librié from the restrictive digital rights management (DRM) with which Sony has chosen to cripple its device. Books are "purchased" and available to read for 60 days. The DRM then erases the file, and the user is left with nothing. Not done reading the book? Too bad. Librié only supports its proprietary BBeB (broadband ebook) file type, so it isn't possible to use it to read one's own HTML and PDF files, though there is a tool to convert PDF files to the Sony format. In essence, books are being rented to consumers, making Sony some sort of high-tech, for-profit doppelganger to the public library.

Right now Librié is only available in Japan but can be imported through www.dynamism.com for about $600. The price combined with the restrictive digital rights management and lack of content (there are presently about 400 Japanese-language books for rent) relegates this device to the realm of really early adopters and other supergeeks.

For librarians: It's good to see electronic ink finally make it to market. However, it remains to be seen whether its crispness and clarity will lure ebook readers away from the devices they already carry around (like laptops and Palms) and to a unique device just for reading. Librarians will want to keep their eye on the reader market—if a device takes off, we will want to find a way to support it.