We’ve gotten some glowing feedback about Plinkme. And we’ve gotten some constructive criticism:

“When I first saw PlinkMe, I thought it might be the coolest idea ever. … PlinkMe would be the perfect product if it weren’t for one thing: they’ve used javascript for the widget codes, even though they display as Flash. This rules out usage on MySpace, hi5, Tagworld and many more social networks…” — Pete Cashmore

We took the critique onboard and actually developed a widget that will display plinkme.com photos on MySpace; see http://www.myspace.com/85209816

However, in their infinite wisdom, MySpace has now disabled links from within flash widget that appear on their site.

So the question: would you still like to see the continued development of a pure flash widget?

Note: I would not recommend using the test flash widget demoed above on MySpace as it is VERY alpha and subject to discontinued development/support.

Plinkme is Free Exposure!

It may be a little odd that we’re answering the question: “What is Plinkme?” months after its beta release. But hey, we’re techies as well as the Plinkme developers (read: maybe we’re too close to the project). So perhaps we didn’t do the best job of comprehensively sharing Plinkme’s story.

Well, we’ve worked to fix this. You can now read all about Plinkme for Publishers and Plinkme for Photographers.

One thing that Plinkme didn’t do well, until very recently, was browsing images. We did ok: visit the Gallery, click around to a category, click back, click around some more; it worked much like any other gallery out there. The problem was, it wasn’t any fun. To stop looking at animals, you had to go back to the main gallery to pick a new category, moving from “Cats” to “Commerce” was at least three clicks and three page loads, and one thing’s for sure, page loads are not fun. So we fixed it.

The browser is simply the gallery without all that work. Click browse, then click on something you want to see. Bored of the Insects? One click and butterflies become guitars. Bored? Click. Pianos are fireworks. It’s almost addictive.

We put together plinkme as we wanted an easy way to put photographs on all our articles. At M6.Net we’d submitted over 130 articles around the internet in just over a year. We also publish a lot of articles on our site. And page after page of text was not visually inspiring so we asked ourselves the question - how can we quickly get a photo on each of them with little effort?

We came up with the idea of a photo gallery with a small piece of Javascript code that would identify a relevent photo for the page and automatically show it. Then we thought we needed to inspire others to put their photos in the Gallery. Jordan and I are avid photographers and put up some of our own photos but for it to work on the multitudes of different articles we’d need to entice thousands of photographers. So we came up with the idea of making each photo link back to a photographers gallery. We figured a good use of internet technology for a win-win between Article writers (page publishers) and photographers.

We had the idea of plinkme so someone could show a photo of 100’s or thousands of pages simply by pasting a bit of javascript code into their pages or page template and save the drama and hassle of selecting photo’s downloading, cropping and all the work that goes into just putting one photo on the page. Imagine having to do that 100 times or more - you’d be days away from seeing photos on all your articles… now you can see why we put plinkme together.

Yet as more and more people use plinkme we’re seeing people use it for different purposes. Like Dr Andrew Jones at http://www.veterinarysecretsrevealed.com/blog/ - who is using it to show a new photo of dogs everytime the page is refreshed. It adds a bit of extra spice to the page with little effort. And we now have a multitude of links back to Dr Jones site.

Then there is http://www.whonet.info/photos.html who is using plinkme to show a little gallery of arty type photos and again we have a multitude of links back to whonet.info.

It’s great to see people working out new and different ways to use plinkme on the net even though we set out to create a relationship between article writers and photographers and mainly so page publishers can get photos across their site in a in less time than it takes to put up one in the old way.

Let us know your comments and post other ideas you’ve had for using plinkme and we’ll do our best to accomodate them and share them with others.

Thank you!

Michael

We are happy announce the beta release of plinkme (ok, so the announcement is a bit delayed as many of you have already been playing with it). We have a lot planned for plinkme, but we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think, what direction plinkme should go in, and how we can make plinkme better for you.

Thanks