The crucial feature of Facebook photos is that, by default, friends can tag users in pictures without the users confirming that the pictures are actually of them. So with the new layout, friends can decide what pictures show at the top of a person’s profile. And for the more creative, they have five concatenated pictures in which to do so.

Facebook users are already having fun with this option, pranking each other to show inappropriate pictures and silly sequences of words. BuzzFeed ran an NSFW example of this earlier this week, with one of its users apparently pulling the suggested prank on the Facebook of a fellow named Trent Reznor.

Users worried about their profiles being hijacked for everyone to see can change their privacy settings. (For instance, a user can limit who is allowed to see other people’s photos she is tagged in.)

Top image by BuzzFeed user shwagner.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook on my ethics page.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

BoomTown motored on down the lovely Highway 280 in Silicon Valley to Facebook to hear execs talk about a new geo-location feature the powerful social networking site is rolling out today.

And, the new name of the service, which will be deeply integrated into its current update system, as I reported earlier, will be “Places.”

The service seems to be basic and useful–it is reviewed here by Walt Mossberg–allowing people to post their location on the Wall of their Facebook profile, much as you might a photo or video.

There will be no games, no mayors and no special discounts either in Facebook Places–just plain and simple checking in and, presumably, taking names.

Privacy is a big focus of the launch of Places, which will allow users to decline to be placed by others.

The $100 million question is how much Facebook will allow the integration of other competing services including Foursquare.

A lot, it seems, as sources said Foursquare Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was invited to appear for the announcements, perhaps to minimize the idea that this is a Foursquare-killer.

It’s not. Today.

4:30 pm PT: Of course, I and a badillion other reporters arrived on time, to 1050 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif. in a mass of media force that would probably better be deployed on more weighty topics than the particulars of checking in from some hip dive bar in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.

After some waiting, we were finally bussed–or perhaps the better word is geo-located–to the actual HQ of Facebook nearby, and shepherded (just like sheep that we are!) into its cafeteria.

Except it had been duded up like a tiki lounge with palm trees and a driftwood stage. I felt as though I was suddenly on an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” Cue Ginger for her big song number with the coconut bra!

Hey, Skipper…

5:18 pm: That skipper would be CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was–as usual–dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and was endearingly awkward as always. It’s kind of touching that Zuckerberg still tries to have the just-us-guys posture, despite all the fame and fortune.

He quickly announced Facebook Places, across the U.S. tomorrow, on an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and a mobile Web site.

He talked about deciding to finally launch Places after a dinner out with his girlfriend, when, deploying a test version, they realized another Facebook exec, Chris Cox and his fiance were nearby at another restaurant.

It was an earth-shaking moment, implied Zuckerberg.

Ahem, knock, knock…that’s Foursquare! Have you heard of it?

Yes, Facebook has been ogling the hot New York location start-up for a year, which is precisely why we are all here.

5:28 pm: Michael Sharon, the product manager of Places gave us a little run-through of the service, which was about what you would expect.

Foursquare except cleaner. Booyah except no games. Gowalla except, well, not Gowalla.

What’s important is that it is very integrated into Facebook’s current features, such as the Wall and status updates. Which is the right thing to do since Facebook has no business being all trendy.

The plains are covered with the bodies of pioneers, as they say, so what Facebook Places is, essentially, is a fast follow.

Sharon moved onto privacy, the big gorilla in the room. You have to opt-in and agree and click here and default to off and you can only tag your friends and you can also block them too.

Also, per Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” all Facebook citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.

Next, lots of info about APIs, so partners can also be part of Facebook’s geo-locating universe.

Up trotted Gowalla’s CTO and Co-founder Scott Raymond, who showed off Gowalla and Facebook integration.

Then a Foursquare exec–not Crowley, who has apparently checked in at a Chipolte in New York at the time of the places launch–loped up to say how great it all is. Just great! Really! Frankly, what else would the Foursquares say at this point.

Next: Yelp dude. Great! Just great! Integration! Check-in and pull your Facebook friends into the Yelp app.

Of course, it would not be a set without Booyah’s Keith Lee. Loves it! Fun! Just great!

This felt like a slow-moving version of invasion of the geo-location snatchers, a parade of glassy-eyed hostages, some scurvy mates walking the platform plank. Aaaaarrrr.

5:50 pm: Finally, Facebook’s product head Chris Cox, who is perhaps one of the more fetching geeks out there, bounded onstage to be all fetching and smart.

He talked about places like home, work and, um, bars. Well, actually, community locations, quoting Ray Oldenburg.

I was honestly not really listening to him at all, because I was riveted on his new haircut, which is just like the buzzed one Vince got on “Entourage” this season.

Errant thought: Those guys on “Entourage” would never check in from a bar! They are totally busy getting their groove on with the ladies–even Johnny Drama–and chillaxing with the doobies and tequila!

When I checked in again mentally, Cox was still chattering away about some glowing phone that tells you everything that happened in that bar forever and ever, since everyone was checking in and memorializing the place over time.

Good god, isn’t it enough that Facebook has all those drunkey-drunk photos from college students nationwide.

No! It wants it all! Yay, all our our drunkey-drunk moments will now be preserved in check-ins for all eternity!

Honey, remember when I ended up in the gutter here? Fun times for our grandkids to unearth one day!

5:58 pm: The Skipper Zuckerberg was back to moderate the Q&A.

Privacy questions about making private places public. If a lot of people are there, it becomes public.

Next: What up with monetization with deals? Zuckerberg notes that Places is at its starting point and “certainly you can imagine these things in the future.”

There was a question about how Places started. Well, IMHO, the moment when Facebook saw Foursquare’s innovation and freaked out.

A very goofy question about what happens when drunkey-drunk places shut down and all those memories are gone, which made me wonder if the reporter asking was drunkey-drunk.

“That’s not a problem we can solve,” said Cox.

Good answer.

Now, the Skipper wants to show us a Facebook custom, which made me suddenly nervous. Sacrifice of the media? No, just some switch-pulling thing.

There was apparently also another tradition–for a six-year-old company, that is–of hitting some gong.

Aha, it’s “The Gong Show.”

Geo-locate that.

Twitter has quietly been reaching out to marketers about its new ad platform for a few months, but now it’s a full-fledged marketing blitz. The messaging service rolled out its ad strategy to the press last night; today it’s going directly to the ad industry, via COO Dick Costolo’s presentation at Ad Age’s Digital Conference.

I’m not sure how much more Costolo will reveal that Twitter hasn’t put out already–or may be waiting to talk about at tomorrow’s Chirp conference. But since I’m here I’ll liveblog it anyway.

Liveblog

Costolo says he has been waiting five or six months to give this presentation. It’s time to walk through the rollout, he adds, making note of his “fascinating nontraditional” prediction last fall.

He explains the Twitter ecosystem. The ad platform has to go everywhere, not just to Twitter.com. He refuses to call the ads, “ads.” They’re “just tweets.”

“Promoted tweets,” that is.

He walks through the @hashtagtees example.

There’s a menu from which ad buyers can pick search terms and associate them with specific tweets they’ve already published.

Promoted tweets look and act like regular tweets except that they’re labeled as promotions and stay at the top of the Twitterstream.

A promoted tweet “combines earned media and paid media in one space,” Costolo says.

“Earned” media are free, Costolo reminds the audience. That is, if people retweet your paid tweet, there’s no charge additional charge.

The pitch continues: Ads are “real time,” and so are analytics–you can see how ads are performing second-by-second.

Twitter will start with Twitter.com search. That’s phase one. The plan will roll out more broadly, but the company is doing it this way because it wants a “thoughtful, user-centric approach” to figuring it out. “We will quickly expand into syndication…all of our syndication partners.” And here, Costolo specifically mentions UberTwitter in the list of partners.

Important: Twitter will definitely expand into the regular timeline at some point. That is, you will be getting ads in your stream whether you search or not. Ad-free Twitter is over.

Costolo talks about the “resonance” metric Twitter will use to figure out which promoted tweets show up and where.

Each ad partner will see a scoreboard with different metrics: Retweets, @replies, #tag click, avatar clicks, link clicks, views after RT.

Advertisers won’t pay for ads that don’t resonate with users.

Next, Costolo describes communication on Twitter as both “one to many” and as a “real-time interest graph.”

Pricing will start as CPM. Twitter is doing this because it doesn’t know how to correlate “resonance” with value yet. As the company figures this out, it will move to a pricing model based on ROI.

Here comes Porter Gale, VP of marketing for Virgin America, a launch partner. She notes that @jack is flying VA right now.

[You're not missing anything here.]

Um, here’s a free ad for two-for-one tickets on Virgin. Don’t really follow it but sure you can figure it out if you’d like.

And here’s Ellen Stone, SVP of marketing at Bravo.

She is also excited!

[You're not missing anything here, either.]

Stone describes some sort of live, real-time convergence between shows broadcast and users’ tweets. Makes my head hurt. Hope it doesn’t pop up during “Top Chef.”

Back to Costolo: More monetization coming. Commercial accounts coming after promoted tweets will “feather into this platform very very nicely.” One dashboard will manage both products.

Q&A

Will tweets be syndicated to Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), and other partners that take the stream?
Costolo says yes, without mentioning any specific search engine or media pub.

Will there be revenue-sharing with publishers and bloggers?
Yes, with developers and publishers. Costolo says Twitter will talk about this at its Chirp conference and focus on the syndication piece there. Revenue sharing will be “very transparent,” he adds.

Early reaction from consumers?
Yes, Twitter is getting a “wait and see,” Costolo notes. [From whom? Who's seen it?] The company will take its “learnings” from search and go forward. Twitter ads should be live and running now.

What CPM are you charging?
Twitter is playing around with different numbers, trying to figure it out. When a term is owned or created by a client, like Virgin America, should it have “rights” to that hashtag, whereby no one can outbid it? Some hashtags only have value at certain times. Like “Super Bowl,” which is only useful for a couple hours in the year. So we have to play around and test different kinds of pricing. “We don’t know the answer to that yet.”

What kind of reactions are you looking for from users?
Costolo says Twitter is looking to see whether people click or interact with ads and paying attention to the tenor of reaction: Positive or negative, etc. Think about the iPad launch this month. People were having battery issues. Someone could have jumped in in real time and bought a promoted tweet that dealt with that. Twitter’s hope is that when people see these, they’ll get why they work.

Please talk about search volume.
“Massive. It’s huge.” Will talk about hashtags tomorrow. But on Twitter.com, it’s a small piece of traffic. So we’re not maximizing revenue now. We’re figuring it out.

How will location work with ads?
“We think significantly.” There are lots of opportunities down the road. As this gets more sophisticated, will see opps for small and big business.

Will marketers be able to get resonance scores for companies that aren’t using promoted tweets?
Not at first. But possibly.

Will you share revenue with TweetDeck, etc.?
Yes. We’ll talk about this tomorrow so we can save something for those guys. Revenue-sharing will be very transparent. Costolo name-checks Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck and Loïc Le Meur at Seesmic.

Finished up. I will have some questions for Costolo myself, a little later this afternoon.

The Web’s dominant traffic counter is in the midst of overhauling its traffic-counting system in response to years of complaints from publishers who insist that their traffic has been undercounted.

Turns out, the publishers were often right.

ComScore’s old data, for instance, say the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo’s December traffic at 20 million uniques.

The difference is that comScore’s (SCOR) old system tracked small panels of users and extrapolated their traffic patterns across the Web. But its new “hybrid” system uses panel data along with records generated by actual visits to the site, counted via tracking cookies. Publishers that cooperate with comScore (SCOR) agree to let the company “tag” every Web page on their sites.

“This is a much much better, much more methodologically rigorous way of doing this,” says Linda Abraham, comScore’s chief marketing officer.

ComScore has been rolling out the new system for months and says it can now use it to report on 25 percent of the 50 biggest sites on the Web. Another 50 percent of the top sites have agreed to work with the system, Abraham says.

ComScore lets publishers who are already clients participate in the program for free. But it will charge everyone else $10,000 a year, which the company says helps cover the cost of new servers and other equipment it needs to process the new deluge of data.

UPDATE: Some more detail on comScore’s fees, which generated a Web flare-up after this piece ran. Abraham notes that comScore’s set-up fee is $5,000, which she says covers implementation costs and gives publishers access to its data for six months; comScore charges publishers who want to keep receiving reports an additional $5,000 for each subsequent six-month period. However, Abraham notes, “If you choose not to purchase report access, you are free to do that, and we’ll continue to report you as hybrid, free of charge, as long as you continue to beacon correctly.” For more from Abraham, see her response to Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s criticism; here’s the company’s blog post on the subject.

The new system doesn’t necessarily generate a traffic boost. AOL’s (AOL) Living channel saw its numbers decline by two percent in the new system, for instance, and its radio site saw traffic drop by 20 percent. AOL’s overall traffic, though, is up nine percent by comScore’s count.

Hybrid measurement is particularly kind to small Web sites and those that generate a lot of traffic from users who visit while at work. Both categories have always been difficult for comScore to measure using panels.

TheStreet.com (TSCM), for instance, has watched its traffic shoot up 86 percent under the new system, to 3.3 million uniques. That’s still much less than the site itself reports–in its last quarterly filing, the financial network reported an audience of 8.1 million uniques.

The fact that comScore is tracking some Web sites using the new system and the rest of them with the old one will make things a bit sticky for some time. The company has stopped releasing its monthly Top 50 list until May, when it says it will have moved almost all participating sites into the hybrid system.

But some sites won’t end up working with comScore at all, which means that comScore will measure them with its old panel methodology. At some point, the company will be presenting apples-to-oranges numbers when it compares different sites.

Does any of this really matter? Yes and no.

Ad buyers do pay attention to comScore rankings when figuring out where to place their money, even as Web publishers have presented their own, higher numbers from their own server logs. For some sites, the new data will make their pitches more compelling.

On the other hand, this does nothing to solve the real problem facing most publishers: They can’t sell ads against all of their inventory, no matter who’s counting it. And a measurement system won’t ever be able to help with that one.

Well, you knew the kids would eventually get tired of throwing all those sheep and posting drunken pictures of themselves.

Now comes a more sober, but still utterly self-absorbed new craze on social-networking sites, most especially on Facebook of late.

It’s called “25 Random Things” and the explanation of what it is is simple:

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)”

You can imagine the details that emerge. Lots and lots and lots of details. And very random. But they can also be quite revealing about people you know.

Here is the list, for example, from my great friend, Joe Brown, whom I have known for more than two decades.

He works for the Las Vegas Sun and even did a column about a year in a new city, as viewed via Facebook.

I knew pretty much all of what he wrote about himself, but was pleasantly surprised to find out about the earthworm named “Willy”:

1. I live in Las Vegas, but I am immune to most of the things–gambling, women, booze–that charm people into coming here.
2. I’m a Mac person. Also a liberal, a homosexual, an ex-Catholic, a VW Beetle driver, and I preferred Betamax.
3. I have more than 20,000 songs on my iPod.
4. I like books about people with addictions, problems, eccentricities and extraordinary abilities.
5. Sports are invisible, inaudible and incomprehensible to me.
6. I like autumn colors–and autumn itself.
7: Food obsessions include guacamole, bloody mary mix, kung pao chicken, pickles and olives, ice cream cake, blue cheese, potato chips with french onion dip, meatballs.
8. I was 4 years old when I first appeared in the newspaper–as the owner of an earthworm named “Wiggly.”
9. I would rather read than have sex.
10. I have only owned one car all my life, and I wouldn’t have that if a generous friend hadn’t given it to me.
11. Being 50 feels like a relief. I like my gray hair.
12. I’ve met a lot of celebrities in my career, but the only ones who awed me were Lynda Barry and Morrissey.
13. I dream of living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
14. Extremely stupid movies–”White Chicks,” “Hey Dude, Where’s My Car?,” “Superstar!,” “Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion,” “Dumb & Dumber,” “Napoleon Dynamite”–make me laugh till I can’t breathe.
15. I am a cat person, but I’m allergic to cats, which is very sad.
16. I hate overhead lighting with a fierce passion.
17. I unironically adore reality TV.
18. I have no tattoos and have let the hole in my ear close up.
19. I have never had a “Plan B.”
20. Reasons for living include The Sun Magazine, This American Life, sleep, good smells…
21. For most of my life, people have said my name as if it was one word: “Joebrown.”
22. Carol Burnett scratched my back while I was talking to Cary Grant. At the White House.
23. I still dream about my unrequited loves.
24. I have always stood up for the underdog, the bullied, the unpopular. And I’ve been beaten up for it.
25. It’s hard for me to say goodbye, but when I leave, I’m gone, and it’s over.

Joebrown tagged me, of course, but it is doubtful I have the time to banter endless about my quirky ways.

In fact, I am already too lazy to accept my 818 friend requests or answer my 479 messages or deal with my 114 other requests on Facebook.

But let it not be said, BoomTown won’t make some smidgen of effort.

So, here are just five of mine:

1. I am a major Fanilow of Manilow.

5. On the bright side, someday I plan to become a Luddite hermit.

Now there’s a way to upload photos that are already labeled with their exact latitude and longitude using geotagging, the fancy name for labeling data with information on its geographic origin. Photos with “geotags” have coordinates embedded invisibly in them. Some programs or online photo services use these tags to generate maps showing just where each photo was taken, or to label or organize the images. Not long ago, this capability was mostly done through manual labeling or with costly equipment.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card from Eye-Fi Inc. gives people the ability to wirelessly send geotagged photos from a digital camera.

This week, I tested the $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card (EyeFi.com), a special two-gigabyte memory card from Eye-Fi Inc. that adds a photo geotagging feature to Eye-Fi’s original functionality: the automatic wireless uploading of photos, straight from a digital camera to a home computer or photo-sharing service. If all goes well, users can capture and upload what are essentially geographically prelabeled batches of digital photos — with minimal effort and time.

But after days of testing, I found myself more frustrated as I used this wireless memory card in various places and situations, and found the tagging to be unreliable in one scenario. (Eye-Fi Inc. said my experiences weren’t typical.) At home in Washington, D.C., and while on a business trip to California, I tried it using a two-year-old Kodak digital camera and two different Vista laptops, though it also works on Macs.

Eye-Fi introduced the Explore Card as a follow-up to the company’s original wireless memory card, which it introduced last fall. Once set up, the first Eye-Fi card initiated the transferring of photos to a computer or Web site whenever the digital camera was turned on and as long as it was near a pre-associated wireless network.

Through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the Explore card can automatically label photos with their latitude and longitude using data from the Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system. As long as a photo is captured within the Skyhook coverage area, which the company says covers 70% of North America, and the geotagging is enabled, each photo will be coded with data identifying where it was captured.

The Explore Card turned otherwise normal photo-sharing sites into mini maps showing where I had traveled while on a business trip in Silicon Valley. I set my account up to work with Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Picasa Web Albums, though only one will work at a time. Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and Smugmug make use of geotagged photos by tagging shots with their location data, such as “Downtown Palo Alto, California.” I used Flickr and Picasa Web Albums to instantaneously generate a map showing where I was when I took photos.

On Flickr, each image was represented by a pink dot associated with one of several photos displayed in a horizontal bar below the map. This map can be searched for specific tags (photo labels) or locations and can be narrowed to show images from everyone who uses Flickr, just your own photostream, or only photos from friends or contacts. My searches returned results in seconds, finding shots that were geotagged with “Palo Alto” and tagged by me as containing flowers. I enjoyed looking at other Flickr users’ photos when I searched everyone’s images, specifically in cities where I recognized landmarks.

Picasa Web Albums showed each geotagged image on a map by placing tiny versions of each photo on the map. In certain cases, when I had multiple photos taken at the same spot, photos appeared with lines drawn from them to a spot, much like spokes of a wheel. I also looked at my Picasa photos on maps in Google Earth; a quick link to the program is conveniently found at the top of the Picasa Web Albums screen.

Another key feature of the Explore Card is its hotspot connectivity. The card is capable of working in any Wayport location, which includes McDonald’s (MCD) restaurants and certain airports and hotels. Though using Wayport locations normally requires sign-ins and/or payment via a computer screen, the Explore Card works as soon as the camera is turned on in these locations. This service is free for the first year, but after that, it costs $19 annually to continue.

Finally, the Explore Card notifies users via SMS or email messages when photos have either started or finished uploading; or if these uploads are interrupted, which happened to me a few times. This is useful in Wayport wireless zones, where the camera has no real way of signaling when an upload is finished or when a computer isn’t handy.

In a hotel with a flaky Wi-Fi network, the Explore Card was crippled, though I blame the hotel for this inconvenience. But even when I traveled to a local McDonald’s, where Eye-Fi’s maker has a deal for free Wi-Fi for its cards, the Eye-Fi stuttered and couldn’t consistently upload photos. When I plugged the card directly into my laptops, the results weren’t much better.

If you aren’t within Wi-Fi range while taking a photo, it won’t be geotagged. I ran into this issue in one instance: On California’s highway 101, I took a handful of photos, but when I checked my Eye-Fi account later, none of these photos was automatically geotagged.

Some people worry about privacy settings when it comes to uploading geotagged photos directly to a sharing Web site. Settings within the Eye-Fi Manager make it easy to adjust permissions to determine who can see your photos within each of about 25 sharing sites.

Users can opt to share photos only to a home computer through their own Wi-Fi network, and a special card is designed for just that: the $79 Eye-Fi Home. This is meant to serve as a shortcut for transfers.

The original Eye-Fi, which costs $99, was a useful tool as a wireless memory card, but I didn’t have as much luck with the more expensive Eye-Fi Explore. Still, when it did work, I found geotagging to be a great way of automatically labeling and organizing my photos. Instead of just being neatly stored in a folder on your computer, geotagged images are given a spark of life and relevancy when plotted out on a map.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: mossbergsolution@wsj.com