This morning I read about another new social bookmarking site in town, and this one has a twist, it’s for photos. our.imgSeek.net seeks to combine the likes of flickr and del.icio.us by letting users “tag” images they find on the web. Based on the user’s tagging of images, the site then makes recommendations about other images the user might like.
I’ve got one huge beef with this: the way the site is implemented, it steals my bandwidth. I signed up for an account, and for kicks decided I’d go tag one of my images. I chose my photoshopped down-on shot of the CN 5714 I posted last week. Once I tagged the image, I went to the site and looked at the photo. A “view source” revealed that they’re embedding the photo directly off my domain using an IMG tag. Every time someone looks at the photo on their site, it sucks my bandwidth.
Come on guys… this isn’t going to fly. Update your code. Create your small little 90 pixel wide cache image on your site, then if a user wants to see the whole image, let them click through to my site and see the image in its original context. It’s a brand new app with almost zero impact (only 39 users as of this posting) but if it catches on, I’ll block the domain if they don’t shape up. Deep-linking embedded images (especially large ones) has always been a no-no, and our.imgSeek.net needs to use some internet etiquette.