Yes, the inevitable iPad post has hit the 23 blog.

Obviously we’re very excited about the iPad – not only because Apple introduced a new product (we are dedicated, naïve fanboys here at the office), but because the shape of the device itself is interesting for us. After it was introduced, our internal “digital watercooler” – Yammer – was red hot with posts from 23-employees discussing which version of the iPad would be the best purchase. Not if we should buy it, but which one.

The “tagline” of 23 is “The Visual Sharing Company”. We like things that are communicated visually and our products reflect that. We already have tight integration between 23 Video and other platforms such as podcasting through iTunes and RSS, directory listing in Boxee and an iPhone/Android-optimized site (try accessing http://video.reboot.dk on your iPhone/Android). The integration with other platforms is essential for sharing video with customers who want to access the content in their own way.

With the introduction of the iPad on Wednesday, we saw a new potential for our customers to reach out and create compelling experiences for their customers. After all, video already looks good on the iPhone, but it will look absolute stunning on the iPad with a screen size four times larger than the iPhone.

So tell us, what are some of the things you look forward to seeing the most on the iPad?

Last week, part of the 23 team were in Amsterdam to touch base on the local scene and get to know a bit more about the lovely Dutch people’s opinion on video. It was a nice trip that took us all around the city, and we got to meet up with people from the web business as well as government and public service. Hopefully we’ll soon be able to show you some more tangible outcome from the trip, but until then, here’s a selection of some of the pictures we took in Amsterdam:

All the pictures are taken with an iPhone and edited using the Camerabag application on the iPhone. It’s by far the easiest way of producing images that are of far higher quality than you (well, I, for one) can usually create. If you want to see more, the whole gallery from our trip is here: 23 in Amsterdam

In the coming months, we will be in a bunch of other European cities, so feel free to get in touch if you want to hear more about 23 Video or just say hi.

This is one of my favorite photos of the year. Taken by andjohan of mr. Moltke after our joint Christmas party with our friends from Socialsquare.

At 23 we’re always excited to see new features being made available to web users, and luckily the developers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome all seem to be pulling in the same direction. The most recent beta version of Firefox includes support for file drag-and-drop, and we thought we’d give you a preview of how this would work for uploading photos to 23.

So, if you’re using Firefox 3.6 beta 4 (or higher…) try dropping some photos onto the 23 site in your browser. In the upper right-hand corner you’ll see that you’re photos are being uploaded to your photo sharing account — and a simple progress indicator is showing you how far along the upload is.

If you drop files into the browser while you’re browsing an album, a tag or a photogroups, the uploaded photos will be automatically added to that album/tag/group.

Obviously this feature is experimental at the moment, but hopefully we’ll be able to expand support as Safari and Chrome add support for this standard in their browsers.

  Photo by claudecf and of course there's more 23 fun in the 23spotting tag section and in the spotters photogroup.

Our good friends from Polar Rose launched support for 23 yesterday — and today we’re very excited to announce face recognition on 23: We’ll now be making it very easy to find and name people in your photos on the site.

First, what Polar Rose does is both very simple and very tricky: They look through your photos − you can select if you want this to be only your public photos − and then find people or faces in those photos. Their brand of magic groups those people so you can easily find multiple photos of the same person, name the people in the photos and see who’s appearing next to whom in your snapshots.

So we promised it would be easy? 23 now sports a new tabs called “Faces”. When you click the tabs you’ll find a short description of how we’re integrating with Polar Rose; and to allow Polar Rose to index and match your photos, simply click the “Match faces in my 23 photos” button:

Now, you’ll be asked to log in via Facebook Connect and select how you want the facial recognition service to handle your photos.

Finally, when you’re done naming people on Polar Rose, you’ll see that your 23 photos now have fotonotes outlining the people you’ve been photographing — and that you get links to all the photos the people are appearing in. Polar Rose will even push information about the people in your 23 photos to your Facebook friends.

We’ve been happy to be the second photo sharing site to be featured on Polar Rose’s wonderful service; and this is only the first step. In the future we’re hoping to bring you even tighter integration on this new service.

If you didn’t have the pleasure of following the 23 server team on Twitter over the past hours, here’s the short version: 23 was offline for a few hours while we moved to brand-new hardware. Everything went pretty smoothly and we’re hoping this will make for a faster, more stable and just plain better 23.

Thank you for your patience over the past few hours.

We’ve been preparing to upgrade 23 to entirely new hardware for quite a while. Back in the summer of 2008 we took the first step towards this by moving the current server park to Denmark. Over the fall we’ve been assembling bits and pieces of the new set-up, and in November we took Visualblog live on the new hardware.

Finally, the time has come for 23!

The consequence is that we’ll be offline for a few hours on Sunday March 15th from about 16:00 in Copenhagen. That’s 3pm in London, 11am in New York, 8am in San Fransisco and in between in other assorted places.