Existing applications have begun adding support for 23. Last week, phpFlickr launched (though, for some reason, the name of the project hasn’t been changed to php23r yet? We’d be ready to fund the new domain, if that’s what’s keeping you?).

Today, PhotoMap — a Mozilla extension that combines Google Earth, geo tagging, and photo sharing to display photos in a geographical context — has launched support for 23 as well. Sadly, for our non-America users, map coverage still leaves a lot to be desired.

And, even better, more 3rd-party applications and web services will be following over the next few weeks…

Thomas had a few demo postcards made a while back, but frankly, the photo he used wasn’t too interesting.

Can you do better? If so, you’ll be happy to learn that we’ve set up The 23 Postcard Design Challenge Spring ‘06. The rules are simple: Upload a postcard design to your 23 account and tag it 23postcard. All entries must be in before Friday, March 10th.

We’ll be awarding the three best entries with a year of free 23 Plus — that basically means a year of unlimited uploading. Apart from that, there’s the eternal, undying glory of having your design distributed to promote 23.

Update:
Q: Only postcard’s or also buttons’s and so on?

A: Well, the basic postcard is perfectly okay, but we’d love for the logo and possibly some text/slogan to be on it as well.

As you may have noticed, 23 was brought back online a few hours ago. And in the excitement of being back we’ve updated the site with some of the fruit of this week’s labor. Basically, we’ve done a few minor fixes and met a few requests. For example, our Send feature no longer requires that you send e-mail directly through our interface — if you want, we’ll generate a url for you, which you can manually send to your friends and family.

Apart from these minor changes, we’ve added support for Creative Commons licenses. You can set your default license under Settings:

Then, on all photo pages you’ll see this:

If you choose not to change you default setting, the note will state that you’ve reserved all rights to your photos. In the spirit of sharing, though, go and have a look…

Earlier today 23’s internet service provider lost its internet connection. The site has been down for approximately two hours.

The ISP’s own website is now back up, but 23 is not. We are working on the problem and will post updates here.

23 is back online. We apologize to all users for this very rare unscheduled downtime. We’ll be reviewing procedures together with our internet service provider to make it as unlikely as possible that this will happen again.

phpFlickr allows PHP developers to tab into the richness of the flickr api − and with version 1.5 of the toolkit this includes very easy access to 23 as well.

dancoulter just posted this to our forums:

I’ve added support for 23’s API to the latest version of phpFlickr (version 1.5). If you check out my documentation (section: “Other notes”), you can see how to easily switch the class over to use 23’s API instead of Flickr’s.

Some go skiing, others go climbing big beautiful mountains. jxm has some really beautiful photos from the mountains.

Some Copenhagen, Denmark based 23 users are organizing a meetup on the 22nd february. Click on the photo for more information.

As it turns out we’re better at updating 23 with new features than at updating the users at 23 about those features. I thought I’d give an overview of some of the new stuff, that’s going on:

• Flash upload: The nice people at Macromedia has included a new feature in Flash 8, which has allowed us to add a great improvement to the upload process: Selection of multiple files at once, and real-time progress on the upload. And, better yet, it’s much more stable than that old-time, ordinary browser upload. We’re still testing this feature, but we’re also welcoming you to check it out. When you’ve tried it, please drop by this forum thread and give us some feedback. Within a few days, supported browsers will be taken automatically to the Flash uploader, if their browser is supported.
• Blogging: We’ve given the “Blog this photo” an extensive overhaul, including a WYSIWYG interface. And we’ve added support for blogging stories as well.
• Send: The Send feature has been changed. Instead of sending a plain text mails with a link, we’re now sending a styled mail with all the photos.
• Languages: The translation project is gathering steam. The latest upgrades have included many more translations, and for example Spanish is only inches from being complete. Have a look at 23 in Spanish, 23 in Norwegian, or go back to 23 in English.
• Sign-up: If you’re already a 23 user, this won’t affect you much. But we’ve made it much, much easier to sign up for at free 23 account. Look! There’s even some help text there!