One of my all-time favorite services, Animoto, has teamed up with SmugMug to make truly epic professional quality videos from both your stills and your video clips.  I’ve wanted this partnership since 2007, but Animoto’s had their hands full dealing with explosive growth, so it took us a little longer to sit in that tree together than we thought.

We had my good friend, Robert Scoble, over last night to demo for him, and you can see the video below (or click here to view it on blip.tv):

The really great thing about this is that it’s totally full-circle and tightly integrated.  Find your favorite photos on SmugMug, send them over to Animoto right from SmugMug’s interface (look in the ‘Buy’ button), make a video on Animoto, and then export the video straight back to SmugMug.

It’s awesome, our customers love it, our customers’ customers love it, and I know you will to!

This is really cool. Rackspace is hiring people to work on Drizzle full-time for their cloud product, Mosso. Adrian Otto writes the Drizzle mailing list:

I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project’s mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success.

I’m super-excited about Drizzle and think this is fabulous for the community at large. I’m not alone – Mark Callaghan and Jeremy Zawodny like the idea too.

So if this sounds like your thing, go do it!

SmugMug has always allowed everyone to upload an unlimited number of web-displayable files – JPEG, GIF, PNG, and MP4 – but to date we haven’t been able to accept the RAW files generated by modern digital cameras. For years our customers have been asking, begging, and pleading for us to let them upload their priceless archives.  I’m happy to announce that day has come!

SmugVault is a new SmugMug product that lets you upload all the RAW, PSD, BMP, and TIFF files you’d like.  And not just those – we’ll accept XMP sidecars, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video archives, and anything else you might want to store with your photos.  What’s more, we’ll bundle your files together for easy, intuitive browsing and safe retrieval.

Thanks to an innovative new product from Amazon Web Services, DevPay, you only pay pennies per GB for the storage you actually use each month.  There’s no huge fee with a maximum storage amount – it’s truly unlimited and pay-by-the-drink.  Store one megabyte or one billion megabytes – we don’t care.  Whatever works best for your workflow and archival needs, SmugVault can handle it.

photo by: Andy Williams

Compose a beautiful panorama out of 20 RAW files?  No problem – upload your final JPEG and bundle all 20 RAW files with it, along with your Photoshop PSD containing all your layers and edits and the XMP sidecar detailing the Adobe Lightroom changes you made during the editing process.  You’ll see just the single perfect photo on your SmugMug site, but with a single click, you have access to every component you’ve associated with it.

Don’t want to upload final corrected JPEGs for all the RAWs you shot at that huge event, but still want them stored somewhere safe and sound?  No problem.  Just upload the RAWs straight off your camera and we’ll store them for safe retrieval.  Want us to generate JPEG previews of those uncorrected RAW files so you can browse your SmugVault visually to find that perfect shot?  We’ll do that too.

Loving SmugMug’s new HD video features, but wishing you had somewhere safe to archive the original footage rather than the web-friendly lower bitrate copies?  Not a problem.  Just add them to your SmugVault.

Unfortunately, we hear about people losing their priceless memories to hurricanes, fire, and computer failure almost every day.  We’ve always been glad we can simply help them get the JPEGs back – remember, your photos are yours, not ours – and I’m even more excited that we can now help everyone recover their priceless archives too!

Read more: Release Notes | Pricing | Help | Wiki FAQ

photo by: Jean-Yves

Have you reached stylesheet Nirvana? Are you the designer people go to for a fresh, clean, gorgeous look?

Have I got the dream job for you!

Come build beautiful stuff that millions of people all over the world can enjoy. We’re private, profitable, growing fast – and you could be a vital part of it.

BTW, as always, we’re permanently on the lookout for good software engineers, particularly if you have front-end web browser skills – JavaScript, DOM, AJAX, etc. Drop me a line.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Twitter and why I find it so fascinating, but I definitely have a new term for it: microblogging.

If you put SMS, IM, and blogs into a “Will it Blend” commercial, I think Twitter is the result.

I believe you’ll see me post less “small” things on this blog and more “articles” while I move the other stuff to Twitter. It’s so fun to just whip off a one-liner about something I’m reading, or learned, or thinking about… Very addicting.

Oh, and Twitterific rocks.

Come say hello.

So my Sun T1000 review got dugg, and commented on, and there’s one loud-and-clear message: people would like to see Solaris results.

So would I. But as I outlined in the review, I don’t have any Solaris expertise. I am a busy guy.

(I should re-iterate that Jonathan Schwartz asked for everyone to review the T1000 with Ubuntu, which is exactly what I did.)

So if anyone at Sun would like to spend a few hours with us and help us get this box configured for the same test on Solaris, I’d love to see what it could do and post a follow-up.

Any takers?

There’s some hooplah over Flickr not letting Zooomr have an API key. Just to be clear, as if my earlier post on the ‘lock-in’ subject weren’t already clear enough, we’re happy to play nice with our competitors. Grab a SmugMug API Key, make it easy to migrate your photos – we’re thrilled.

We think competition is good, lock-in is bad, and that the best company should win. We all do things a little (or more than a little, depending) differently than each other. Let the customer choose.

Personally, I thought this would have happened years ago, but they’ve finally done it – Google’s released their SmugMug killer

I’ve got my account already and started to play with it – and I actually quite like it. I’ve only spent a few minutes with it (you can too, if you can’t get an account – here’s a sample account to play with, at least as a viewer). Unfortunately, I’m travelling and on my Mac, so I can’t play with the Picasa integration yet.

Anyway, the things I like about it:

• It’s very clean and simple. Pages aren’t cluttered with tons of crap, browsing is self-explanatory, and the interface revolves around the photos. Good job, Google.
• JavaScript/AJAX-based image browsing with image pre-loading for speed. We’ve got this in testing right now for SmugMug, and it’s really great. The downside is the URLs get a little uglier, but I think everyone can agree the speed tradeoff is worth it.
• Slideshow resizes to your browser window. We do this too, and it’s really the only thing to do. The unique thing about Google’s approach, though, is they show you a lower-rez photo first, stretched to fit your screen, which looks shockingly bad at first. Then the sharp version pops in after Google’s servers are done resizing it. At first, this was sorta disconcerting, but now I’m warming up to the idea. You get a “out of focus” preview while the real deal loads (there’s no getting away from the loading time, there’s a few seconds of rendering time that just can’t be gotten rid of), and then when it does load, it almost looks *extra* sharp because you’d seen the “blurry” one first. Very interesting approach. I’d like to hear from our customers whether they like our approach better or worse (we show a loading pane on the first image, and then don’t flip to the next image until we’ve loaded it completely. Downside is seeing a loading pane, and also irregular slideshow switching times as images are resized).
• No ads! I was shocked to see this, but thrilled, too. People don’t want ads in their photo albums. They don’t go home and clip out newspaper ads and paste them into their physical photo albums. Shocking for Google not to do it, but good idea.

I don’t really have much negative to say about it – Google’s clearly attacking a different market than we are, and they’re doing it with simplicity. I was surprised to see that you only get 250MB (GMail gets GBs for free!), and for $25/year you get 6GB. For $40/year at SmugMug, you get unlimited storage, so this seems outta whack. Doesn’t Google run the largest datacenters in the world? I imagine that’ll change.

Welcome to the game, Google.