Out of 527 votes collected, readers had the following opinions: 41% voters haven’t tried it yet, but are looking forward to it; 24% readers think Google+ is okay; 22% readers love it; 7% voters are just not interested; 4% readers will leave it until it’s reached critical mass; and 1% voters hate it.

Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.

If you look at the results, you’ll see most people are pretty keen to use Google+, even if they haven’t tried it yet.

This week’s poll question is: Flickr Vs Picasa (Google Photos) – What Will You Use?

With Google+ gaining popularity at a rapid rate, Picasa (soon to be known as Google Photos) is looking like it will automatically become an easy, free choice for photo storage — especially for Android users. Will it sway you? What will you use?

So, tell us more about your plan. Will you use Picasa/Google Photos now? Why/Why not?

We’ve put together a list of some of the best apps available for Mac users, some of which have already been reviewed extensively on MakeUseOf, while also highlighting some new apps you may not have heard of yet.

Gmail

MailTab for Gmail gives you quick access to your primary Gmail account from the comfort of your status bar.

What’s cool about MailTab it goes much further than just being a notifier to let you know when you have new messages, or an easy way to read those new messages. You can also reply to emails, compose new emails, delete, archive, add labels, and more. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to quickly pull up the app whenever you need to access your email.

For a more complete Gmail experience on your desktop, Sparrow is the best option available for Gmail users.

Facebook

Facebox Pro for Facebook is similar to MailTab for Gmail in that puts pretty much every Facebook feature within easy reach in your status bar. You can view friends’ profiles, update your status, check your Facebook inbox and even get on Facebook chat. One of the few things that you can’t do using Facebox Pro is upload photos to your Facebook profile.

YouTube

Tubbler is a sleek little desktop app for watching YouTube videos on your Mac. The feature list isn’t very long, but if all you’re looking for is an app to watch a playlist of YouTube videos on – Tubbler is sufficient.

The main drawback is not being able to search for videos on Tubbler itself, but rather having to search for them on YouTube, after which you can drag the URL of the YouTube video to Tubbler to add it to the queue.

If you’re looking for an app to convert YouTube videos to MP3s, the aptly named YouTube to MP3 will do just that. Copy the YouTube URL and hit Add from Clipboard in the app and the video will be automatically queued up. You can download several MP3s simultaneously as well as pause and resume downloads. Downloads are automatically placed inside your Music folder, in a folder named Downloaded by MediaHuman.

If you’re looking for a way to both watch and download YouTube videos on your Mac, the desktop app, MacTubes has you covered. 
MiniTube is another solid option for Mac users who want to watch and download YouTube videos from the comfort of their desktop.

Twitter

The list of free Twitter apps for Mac users is pretty much endless. With the official Twitter App definitely winning as far as popularity is concerned, there is a whole slew of other apps that have been reviewed by MakeUseOf before including Echofon, YoruFukurou and much, much, more.

Flickr

If you’re looking for a convenient app to upload images to Flickr, Flickr Uploadr is the best option. If you want to browse Flickr on your desktop, download Flickroom. Also be sure to check out this list of 5 Mac apps that you can use with Flickr.

What Mac desktop apps do you use for your favorite websites? Let us know in the comments.

It is quite obvious that we (as well as our readers) love the feature because it is unique and really smart. It’s been working wonders for discovering the most creative photography artwork and offering them great exposure. For me, Flickr Interestingness has always been a constant stream of inspiration.

This post looks at more Flickr Interestingness third-party tools created through the Flickr API:

1. Flickr Interestingness Search Tools

Flickriver

Flickriver is one of the most popular tools for searching the Flickr Interestingness section and viewing high-resolution images on a black background:

• Set the photo size to view: minimum is 500-width; you can set to view the large size (when it is available) or to fit the screen;
• See today’s, yesterday’s or the past week’s interesting photos or set the time frame:

Flickrleech

Flickrleech doesn’t have too many search options. Essentially what it does is retrieve interesting photos for a specified day. The good part about this tool is that it lists them all on one page (“Because paging sucks”) and allows you to change the thumbnail size:

GEOinterestingnness

This is both a fun and unique tool that breaks the Flickr interestingness photos into categories by country:

Multicolr

Multicolr is the visual Flickr “Interestingness” search engine and the most awesome tool for color-inspiration you’ll ever be able to find.

The tool lets you browse through “10 million” of Flickr’s most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images using colors instead of words. You can choose up to 10 colors to mix in your search results’ color palette:

Flickr Explorer

This is the fun way to search Flickr Interestingness by username. Find out of any of your photos has been explored!

2. Flickr Interestingness Lean-Back Tools

Sometimes we are just too tired to actually browse. The following two tools will let you get inspired while doing nothing but watching.

Endless Interestingness

Endless Interestingness is the tool that does exactly what it is called: it creates an endless stream of thumbnails from Flickr “Interesting” section. Lean back and watch!

Anytime you click on a thumbnail that stands out from the crowd, you’ll be redirected to the image page on Flickr.

Gimme Shiny

This is a JavaScript slide-show of today’s most interesting photos from Flickr and popular images from deviantART, as well as the most recent images on FFFFOUND.

3. Flickr Interestingness Monitoring Tool

Weirdly enough, Flickr does not provide us with good tools to keep track of daily interesting photos. Therefore the users have had to build such a tool themselves. The result is the Flickr photo RSS that lets you subscribe to either one interesting photo or four photos a day.

That’s an amazing stream of daily inspiration (and one which is easy to scale!)

Bonus! Bring Flickr Interestingness To Your Desktop!

Would you like to get inspired each time you close all your windows and look at your desktop? I am sure you’ll find this tool awesome then!  I got addicted to it as soon as I installed and ran it for the first time!

John’s Background Switcher is a cool little utility that runs in your system tray (down by the clock) and periodically changes the background image on your computer (every ten minutes, hourly, daily or weekly) to something interesting. This tool has turned my Windows desktop into a constant stream of inspiration.

Using “Settings” you can set it to use the Flickr Interestingness section as the source of background images as well as customize the frequency of updates.

Are there any other cool “Interestingness” tools you are aware of? Please let us know what you think!

Ever wonder how much information geolocation leaves behind? As it turns out, quite a lot. The Creepy geolocation tool is a program for Ubuntu and Windows made primarily made to demonstrate just how much information that is, and how easily it could be used for nefarious purposes.

Whether you regularly check in at a certain coffee shop or just occasionally take pictures at favorite park and post them to Flickr, you’re leaving behind a tremendous amount of information. There are patterns, and any patterns can be analyzed. Creepy makes this easy, and the results are…well…creepy. A fairly complete picture of where you spend your time emerges, encouraging you to reconsider providing this much information to the open Internet.

Using Creepy

Launch the Creepy geolocation tool and you’ll be able to add Twitter and Flickr usernames. If you’re unsure of someone’s exact username, don’t worry; there’s a search feature (though using this with Twitter will require authentication). Find the information you need, then provide the usernames.

Once you’ve entered the people you’d like to look up, you may end up waiting a while. How long depends on the number of tweets or pictures that need to be analyzed, so be patient. A lot of information is being gathered.

Creepy scans the user’s tweets for geolocation information, and also scans the meta information in any pictures to supplement this. Once some results do come in, you’ll be able to see all of the geographic information that exists, arranged complete with times and a map:

Of course, not everyone leaves behind some sort of useful trail. Maybe you do, however; use this program to find out.

What This Is About

This program isn’t intended to aid stalkers; at least, presumably not. No, the purpose of this application, like Please Rob Me, a similar program, is to teach people the consequences of leaving too much information about themselves on the web. Far from being concerned about privacy, many people are today broadcasting their every thought and action. This can be fun and exciting, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes.

Whether someone wants to rob your house or “accidentally” bump into you at a coffee shop, you could be inadvertently handing them the tools to do so. Everyone knows this in the abstract; a tool like Creepy makes this uncomfortably concrete.

To quote Yiannis Kakavas, the program’s creator: “Well, I don’t think that the fact that your geolocation information can be gathered and aggregated is disturbing. The fact that you were publishing it in the first place , is , on the other hand.”

What do you think? Does the Creepy geolocation tool make its point well? Are you the sort of person who leaves such a trail behind, and if so were you surprised to see it aggregated? Start a conversation below, because I’d love to be part of it.

So what if you want to look at or locate some of that photographic treasure? There are some great Flickr search engines out there. Ann pointed out 16 of them a few years back, and now I’m here to show you the best of the best. If you’re looking for a high quality photo for a project, article, website, or you’re just bored, these websites can help you find what you want.

1. Compfight

Compfight is a personal favorite among MUO writers. It’s a simple website both in form and function, and it works very well. With Compfight, type in your search query and you can select whether you want to search for that word in the tags of photos or their text descriptions.

You can also opt to look through Creative Commons images, which is important if you’re looking to use a photo for a project. Thumbnails of images will populate after you search and all you have to do is click on one to open up its corresponding Flickr page.

2. Tag Galaxy

Tag Galaxy probably could’ve been the worst Flickr search engine in existence and I still would’ve included it on this list simply because of how cool it is. Just type in your tag on the homepage and click Go to be taken to a search page showing what appear to be planets.

Clicking on the different planets will allow you to drill down your search to a specific tag. For example, I originally searched for the word ‘technology’ and planets named ‘computer’, ‘phone’, ‘laptop’, and ‘ipod’ showed up. Click the tag that most describes what you’re looking for and you will be taken to a 3D spherical image displaying all of the photos associated with that tag.

You can spin the sphere by dragging it and click on individual photos to see them zoomed in. Very cool.

3. Flickriver

Flickriver is another simple Flickr search engine. You can search photos, groups, users, tags, and even places, and photos are displayed vertically on the page according to relevance, most recent, or most interesting. You can also set the size at which photos are displayed on the page.

4. PictureSandbox

PictureSandbox isn’t one of the prettier sites on this list, but it is still very effective. Just type in your search on the homepage and click the Submit button to view photos on not only Flickr, but Stockxpert, Fotolia, Dreamstime, SmugMug, and Webshots as well. If you can’t find the photo you’re looking for on this site, chances are it doesn’t exist.

5. FlickrStorm

FlickrStorm is a very minimalistic photo search site. Like the others on this list, you simply type your search query into the box on the homepage to begin your search. There’s an “advanced” link that you can click if you would like to search for Creative Commons photos that you can use commercially.

With FlickrStorm, you can also view your history of the photos you’ve clicked on, as well as a tray that you can add photos to and download them from.

Honorable Mention: Flickr Flipper

I decided to give an honorable mention to Adobe’s Flickr Flipper application. It’s an application that runs on Adobe Air and it’s pretty lightweight. If you’re looking to flip through random Flickr photos because you’re either bored or not sure exactly what you’re looking for, you should give Flickr Flipper a try.

If you’re looking for more photos, you should also check out Saikat’s article on 5 Good Image Search Engines Apart From Google Image Search.

What’s your favorite way to view Flickr photos?

It’s a great move for users, hopefully inspiring many other one-checkin-does-all application bridges. Foursquare has mentioned that things like this Flickr photo cross-poster might be in the works, but we can get the benefit of the idea now thanks to Flicksquare developer Benny Wong. And luckily for us, Flicksquare is really simple to set up too!

According to TechCrunch, here’s the tweet that started the whole FlickSquare thing.

Using FlickSquare

As per most web apps these days, using Flicksquare is simple as can be. Head over to the Flicksquare page and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Sign-up with FlickSquare involves:

• Logging into your Foursquare account.
• Adding FlickSquare as a friend.
• Authenticating your Flickr account.

… and that’s it! Easy.

There’s no extra log in to remember and no giving your passwords to another new web developer. It’s all done with authentication through FourSquare and Flickr and made as simple as possible.

Once you’re all signed up, FlickSquare shows whether you are actively sending photos or not. If you want to disable FlickSquare, you can turn it off at FlickSquare, de-authenticate via FlickSquare, Foursquare or Twitter or just remove FlickSquare as a friend on Foursquare.

Photo Sync

Once you’re set up with FlickSquare, any photos you add to a new Foursquare check-in will automatically go to Flickr. Adding photos to check-ins prior to your FlickSquare signup doesn’t count – I tried. This will only work for your future check-ins.

It works very quickly: You’ll be able to see the update in FlickSquare and Flickr in no time.

In Flickr, you will get a brief description added saying where you were and linking back to your Foursquare check-in. The photo is automatically geo-tagged to show location data and you also get FourSquare’s machine tags (latitude, longitude and venue number) – It’s a pity it doesn’t tag your photo with the town, country and venue name though! Beware that all photos sent this way will be public in Flickr automatically. You might not imagine anyone would be worried about FourSquare photos being public elsewhere, but when public photos are geo-tagged you need to be sure of your safety.

Future of FlickSquare

While there’s no other alternative, FlickSquare will be mighty, but as soon as FourSquare implements their Flickr integration, most people will have no use for FlickSquare. That is, unless Foursquare do a messy job of it and FlickSquare is known to be the better way to send to Flickr. So, if FlickSquare can listen to users and add features and options quicker and better than Foursquare, they might stay in the game. In the meantime, we still don’t know how long we need to wait for the Foursquare-Flick in-house compatibility – FlickSquare could have a while to get well aquainted.

More Reading

Here’s some extra reading for all you fans of Foursquare and Flickr:

• Check In & Become Mayor Of Your Favorite Venues With Foursquare
• 5 Best Location-Based Alternatives to Foursquare
• What Is Geocaching And How To Have Fun With It
• The App Garden: Great Flickr Tools Collection
• Create Embeddable Maps Of Your Flickr Photos With TripperMap

If you love mashups of web apps (especially Flickr and Foursquare related stuff) let us know your favourites in the comments!