Hotness basically uses the social activity around the photos on their site, "votes, views, and more," to share with members of the JPG community some of the best shots being uploaded per an "algorithm" that they created.
Which I think is friggin' *awesome*. I love the fact that members of the JPG community can have their votes and other activity used to show me even more interesting photos on their site. I love JPG magazine and think it is one of the cooolest sites on the internet today.
We have actually built something similar in Zooomr Mark III that we will release shortly called awesomeness.
The problem?
Well Yahoo would like every site on the internet everywhere to not be allowed to aggregate their user data this way. Slashdot on the situation.
From Yahoo's BS patent application:
You can
Yes.
Is JPG using "at least in part the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object"?
Well, Yes.
So then I guess Yahoo can sue them. Sure digg, reddit, YouTube and many other sites also do the same thing -- and prior art does exist before Yahoo decided to own all social activity on every web site in the world. But, hey, why not try to screw over the rest of the Web 2.0 community and try to play God with how social media can be arranged outside your own domain.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Yahoo's bogus attempt to patent the concept of ranking social media is simply ludicrous. They should rescend the patent application for Interesetingness and publicly state that the ranking of media doesn't belong to anyone. Instead they silently "carry on" proving to the small companies everywhere that all the Kumbayas in the world from Flickr won't change the fact that bottom line Yahoo is about screwing over any other social networks who dare to compete with them in the glorious pursuit of the almighty dollar.
I don't mind Flickr patenting
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