Tracking these parcels through the various delivery networks can be a pain. You need to visit the courier’s website, type in that 52 character alphanumeric tracking code (usually several times as I always make a mistake), only to find that the parcel can’t be located. And when this is cool stuff on the way to you, you need to know where it is, and when it’s arriving – in real time if possible!

A new Hotmail feature called Active Views is designed to help with just this problem. It recognises specific links from associated partners – YouTube embedded video links, Flickr photo links and yes, courier tracking codes, and automatically embeds the linked content into the body of your email.

So the sender pastes in a link to a web service, and you get to see the content without the need to hit up the website – the web is brought to your inbox! For me, that means if I want to know where my parcel is, I just check my inbox. 

The application uses the Flickr API over the internet, so the speed with which you can browse through the files will be heavily dependent on your own internet connection speeds. Since I’m on FiOS, I didn’t see much of a delay, but your experience may differ.

Both a downloadable executable and source code are provided for the Flickr Drive program from the project’s homepage here.

To use Mooncake, you must first sign up for the service at http://beta.redmooncake.net.

To create an album, you begin by clicking on create new collection:

Next you choose “add photos.” Here you can select from either Flickr or SmugMug – and uploading from your PC is a feature listed as coming soon:

Once you enter in your username for your preferred photo-sharing service, you can then choose the album drop-down box to show just the photos from a particular online album:

You can select individual photos or click a link to easily select them all. Once you have all the photos selected, click the “add photos” button at the bottom.  The service will build a deep-zoomable album for you which you can then preview and share.

The album is embeddable as either a standard viewer (400x400) or mini-viewer (200x200) or you can customize the code to your liking using the viewer size options box at the bottom of the page.

You can then copy and paste the code and add the viewer to any web site on the net as either an object, iframe, or javascript embed.

Note: Live Mesh for mobile is currently only open to US and UK customers.

When Live Mesh installs on your phone, it will automatically create a folder called “Mobile Pictures.” In this folder, all the photos you can with your phone’s camera are synced with your PC. Sondre suggests creating a sub-folder within this folder called “Flickr” for the downloads from Flickr's online photo-sharing service.

Now you’re ready to download and install the Flickr2Mesh application. When you first launch the app, you’ll need to specify which folder is to be synchronized (ex: C:\Users\Username\Desktop\Mobile Pictures\Flickr). You’ll then need to authorize the app in Flickr by clicking the “Authorize” button provided.

You can now download your images from Flickr into your Mesh. There’s an option that allows you to pick what size you want your images to be when downloading. From the drop-down box provided, you can select Small, Medium, Large, or Original. Of course, since you’re downloading your images to your phone, you’ll most likely want to select “Small."

Finally, just click “Download.” Next thing you know, all your Flickr photos will have been added to your Mesh, in the right size for viewing on your mobile device. Now you'll be able to view your photos on the go, without having to browse to the Flickr.com web site itself.

You can download and install the Flickr2Mesh application from Sondre’s SkyDrive here (zip file). For more information or access to the source code, visit the blog post here. 

In case you’re not familiar with that term, it means the simultaneous search of multiple online databases or web resources. Zheng notes that the feature may not have gotten the attention it deserves because it was marketed as a way to search SharePoint sites from within Windows 7. While that is sure to get some I.T. admins to sit up and take notice, consumers won’t care as much unless you do something “cool” – like make a tool that searches Flickr.

This feature of Windows 7 is easy for developers to code for as it uses open standards OpenSearch and RSS2. Yes, open standards to interact with something implemented natively in the Windows shell. (You can close your mouth now, it’s not that shocking.)

Anyway, as far as what the tool can do, it’s simple: you can search flickr photos right from within the Windows shell. To the end user, it doesn’t appear any different than a search for photos actually saved on the PC itself. Talk about blurring the lines between PC and web!

Other possibilities Zheng suggests for this feature are searching files on your remote Windows Home Server, searching music on Pandora, searching for videos on Soapbox, etc. (Oh, please please build me those too!)

Anyone who’s running one of the pre-beta versions of Windows 7 can go ahead and start playing with this feature now. It’s a free download from here: http://www.istartedsomething.com/flickrsearch.

Fleace, which stands for Flickr-Enabled Automatic Changer for Everyone (ha!) can’t access photos from anywhere except flickr, but that may be just fine with you. You can have the app display wallpaper based on the tags you specify and you can customize a few options like size, layout, and a countdown timer for previewing images. The timer displays an image for a set time while you decide whether or not you want to use it. After applying the wallpaper, you have the option to shut the program down which is great for those of us who don’t like having apps runs in our system tray.

Fleace is compatible with all versions of Windows and is a free download available from here.

(Thanks gHacks)

After you sign up for Animoto and start creating your first video, you’re promoted to either upload your photos from your computer or direct the app to use images you have stored on an online photo service like flickr, smugmug, Picasa, photobucket, or even Facebook! If you have your photos organized into albums, you can configure Animoto to retrieve the images just from one particular album.

You have to wait for a moment while the application retrieves your images. Ideally, for their 30-second video, you should have around 15 images – more than that, and some could be left off. If you want to make a longer video it’s only $3 – regardless of how many images are used.

For the music selection, you can upload a track from your PC or select one from their online collection, which lets you browse by genre (top 40, indie rock, hip hop, etc.) to find something appropriate. Note: though “Top 40” is a category, I’m either officially old or these are unsigned artists.

Finally, you’ll have your end product – a customized video created with their unique technology. Their app analyzes and combines the images and takes into account every detail about a song – genre, structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals. Every video created will have a distinct set of motion. The video can then be emailed to friends, posted to your social network profile, downloaded to your computer, uploaded to YouTube, embedded on your blog, and more.

Animoto isn’t a new service – they’ve been in the works since 2005 and started receiving a lot of blog coverage last year. However, I personally had not tried the site for myself until today, and now that I have, I have to say I’m highly impressed. The app was fast, slick, and dead-simple to use, and the end product looks great. Looks like I’ll be pimping my MySpace page this weekend!

Examples:

• btmr, on the front car of the train, let 'er rip!
• thunder mountain, on the front car of the train, let 'er rip!
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, on the front car of the train, let 'er rip!
• thunder mountain rr, on the front car of the train, let 'er rip!

If you're emailing in your update from a mobile phone, just attach the picture to the email, and send it to twisney@twisney.com. (Email addressed are NOT disclosed on the site.)

If you're sending in updates via Twitter, just precede the update with @twisney. And if you want to link your email to your Twitter username for use on Twisney, just follow these instructions. That way, all your photos will be available from one page: www.twisney.com/username, which you can then share with your family and friends.

You can keep tabs on other Twisney users from your mobile phone from the mobile version of the site: http://www.twisney.com/mobile/overview

All the photos sent in to Twisney are uploaded to the Twisney group on flickr. You can also see them on a map here.

This program is great, especially if you want to move photos from one site to another, but don't have them all on your PC to re-upload. How convenient!! The software currently supports the following services: Google (Picasa Web Albums), Flickr, Facebook, ShutterPoint, SmugMug, and Windows Live Spaces.

You can download the beta version of the program here.

I'm using them on a RC 1 machine, not sure what other builds they'll work on.