Photoshop Express First Impressions

Adobe launched Photoshop Express this past week. When they announced this effort about a year ago (March 2007), I was thinking it would be a web-based version of Photoshop. So today I signed up for an account. It's still in beta but there are already more than 17,000 galleries online including my lame attempt for a gallery I just put up a few minutes ago.

So what's the verdict? Disappointing!

This is not so much a web-based version of Photoshop but really more of an online gallery with some editing features. If you're looking for a web-based version of Photoshop, go to Splashup.com. Their web-based software features tools and layers that photoshop users will recognize.

If Adobe's focus for Photoshop Express is the online gallery, they need to do more than just offer a splashy way to show-off your pictures. Two things come to mind when I consider using an online photo gallery. Ease of use and the size and quality of the pictures on the slideshow. I first started using online photo galleries through Ofoto (now called Kodak Gallery) and Shutterfly. Although they were easy to use, their slideshow limited the display size of your photo. This has since changed with Shutterfly now allowing you to view your photos in full-screen mode, but Kodak Gallery still resizes your photo down in their slideshow. The full-screen slideshow was what prompted me to switch to using Picasa Web Albums then and today I'm still using it because it's easy to use and their slideshow looks great.

The slideshow on Photoshop Express has some layout options that Picasa doesn't offer. You can choose a single, strip, grid or ring layout and also choose between 2D or 3D effect. Although these features looked clever when I tried them out, I would probably just stick with the single layout mode. Plus the 3D effect gave me a headache after a few minutes of watching these pictures fly into the edges of my screen.

The one advantage that Photoshop Express gives you is the 2 Gig of free space. Picasa only gives you 1 Gig, but expect Google to bump that up as our pictures get larger and larger.

Web 3.0?

We're just getting comfortable with Web 2.0 and now an article from Newsweek is suggesting the coming of Web 3.0. They're suggesting that web-content written/reviewed by experts (Revenge of the Experts) might be the new era that could be Web 3.0. I wonder what the experts think ... after all it took them awhile to agree on what Web 2.0 was really all about.

The gist of the article suggests that the public is getting tired of inaccurate and unregulated information on the internet and we need the experts to come back and give us trustworthy information again.

I think we need to step back and think about what this really means. Who are the experts? Some would say the professionals are the experts, but to me a professional only means someone who gets paid for what they do. But is the professional landscape designer better than my Aunt who genuinely loves gardening and blogs about her success in organic gardening? Is the professional computer programmer better than the college kid who spends countless evenings writing an operating system that he freely distributes to the world? There are lots of countless examples and I think the internet has allowed us to find these experts that traditional businesses, media and organizations may never define as experts. I certainly hope that whatever Web 3.0 turns out to be, these non-professional experts will continue to shine on the web.

Revenge of the Experts

Unfiltered, Unedited News from CNN - iReport.com

CNN is jumping on the community driven news bandwagon. They recently launched iReport.com which allows anyone in the world to upload news-related articles, videos and photos. The key element of this site is that CNN is NOT going to filter or edit any submission. CNN is relying on the community to be the watchdogs and any reader can flag a news article for review. This is similar to how Craigslist relies on the community to flag a posting and seems to work well considering they receive millions of postings a month that their 19-person staff (??? not sure if they broke the 20 staff mark yet) cannot possibly handle reviewing one-by-one.

CNN is saying they will scan the site for news they find important and relevant and those articles may show up on the main CNN.com site.

I think it's commendable for a traditional news organization to do this. Although considering how CNN started, they may not like to be called traditional. But they're big, and powerful and from most people's viewpoint, they are a traditional news organization. It seems that CNN is embracing community driven news without worrying too much that it may someday eclipse the main traditional CNN site in viewer traffic. The point is some traditional news organizations understand that they no longer have the monopoly of trust and the internet has made it possible for citizen journalists to be trustworthy as well.