Spent the evening and part of the morning playing with Breadkrumbs and Qoop. My previous assessment of BreadKrumbs appears to have been off-base, as the insertion of krumbs and their subsequent revelation to the world at large is entirely manual, which is nice. No need to advertise your more deviant habits to those lurking on the Internet freeway.

During my exploration of BreadKrumbs, I happened to encounter the gerbil-in-charge, Steve, who goes by the alias of Robert Oschler. Actually, to be quite honest, he spotted one of my photos, followed it to my blog, read my knee-jerk reaction to his baking and dashed me off an email which pointed out the error of my ways. He was really nice about it and said some marvelous things about my photos, which not only predisposed me to re-examine BK more quickly than I might otherwise have done, but also caused me to rethink gerbil ownership.

Incidentally, initially I thought that Steve/Robert was a neat sort of geek, but I am now of the opinion that he must be The Ubergeek, and a really cool one at that. Anyone with that healthy a relationship to waterfowl must be working on an entirely different plain from the rest of us.

So my assessment of BK, after playing with it, is that it’s a cool way of bookmarking where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. In a sense, it functions as a consolidation of all the ways of marking where you’ve been in Flickr. You can still do all the same stuff (favorites, comments, etc.), but you can also keep a list of what sites were of interest and what you commented on all in the one place. My only quarrels were that the confirmation opens a new window, which bugged me, and going to the pages of a Journey and clicking on “Thumbnails” got me the following friendly public advisory:

the Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ” (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/wordblo/public_html/androidtech/breadkrumbs/journey-thumbnail-gallery.php on line 13

Other than that, it’s pretty cool!

Qoop is another very, very cool thing which I think will be great for those of us who cite as one of the main failings of digital cameras the lack of photoalbum results. With films, you get negatives and a set of prints which you can then shovel into an album to put on your coffee table and bore/amuse/anger/throw at friends and relations. With a digicam, few people ever really bother to go the extra step to print stuff out.

Qoop might just be my solution to that. For $16 USD (plus all applicable moneygrabs), I can get a glossy-paged bound album of 168 pictures, complete with whatever captions I put into Flickr. Definitely going on my list of solutions for hard-to-shop-for relatives for the holidays and for printing out albums of Katherine pictures. What I really like is being able to select exactly which prints go into it. Well laid-out, fun to fiddle with and an easy solution to a nagging problem. Not complaining! I followed it through to where they wanted money and was quite impressed.