We have a scheduled service window tonight between 12.30am and 1.30am for both 23 Video and 23 Photo Sharing due to some software upgrades. This will result in the web services becoming unavailable for a short while, but we expect a maximum of 10 minutes of total downtime.

Update: The maintenance was completed at about 12.50am (CET), and everything is back up after 9 minutes of downtime. We know you were all holding your breath in anticipation, but it’s alright to relax now.

more photos from andjohan

This is one of my favorite photos of the year. Taken by andjohan of mr. Moltke after our joint Christmas party with our friends from Socialsquare.

At 23 we’re always excited to see new features being made available to web users, and luckily the developers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome all seem to be pulling in the same direction. The most recent beta version of Firefox includes support for file drag-and-drop, and we thought we’d give you a preview of how this would work for uploading photos to 23.

So, if you’re using Firefox 3.6 beta 4 (or higher…) try dropping some photos onto the 23 site in your browser. In the upper right-hand corner you’ll see that you’re photos are being uploaded to your photo sharing account — and a simple progress indicator is showing you how far along the upload is.

If you drop files into the browser while you’re browsing an album, a tag or a photogroups, the uploaded photos will be automatically added to that album/tag/group.

Obviously this feature is experimental at the moment, but hopefully we’ll be able to expand support as Safari and Chrome add support for this standard in their browsers.

  Photo by claudecf and of course there's more 23 fun in the 23spotting tag section and in the spotters photogroup.

Our good friends from Polar Rose launched support for 23 yesterday — and today we’re very excited to announce face recognition on 23: We’ll now be making it very easy to find and name people in your photos on the site.

First, what Polar Rose does is both very simple and very tricky: They look through your photos − you can select if you want this to be only your public photos − and then find people or faces in those photos. Their brand of magic groups those people so you can easily find multiple photos of the same person, name the people in the photos and see who’s appearing next to whom in your snapshots.

So we promised it would be easy? 23 now sports a new tabs called “Faces”. When you click the tabs you’ll find a short description of how we’re integrating with Polar Rose; and to allow Polar Rose to index and match your photos, simply click the “Match faces in my 23 photos” button:

Now, you’ll be asked to log in via Facebook Connect and select how you want the facial recognition service to handle your photos.

Finally, when you’re done naming people on Polar Rose, you’ll see that your 23 photos now have fotonotes outlining the people you’ve been photographing — and that you get links to all the photos the people are appearing in. Polar Rose will even push information about the people in your 23 photos to your Facebook friends.

We’ve been happy to be the second photo sharing site to be featured on Polar Rose’s wonderful service; and this is only the first step. In the future we’re hoping to bring you even tighter integration on this new service.

If you didn’t have the pleasure of following the 23 server team on Twitter over the past hours, here’s the short version: 23 was offline for a few hours while we moved to brand-new hardware. Everything went pretty smoothly and we’re hoping this will make for a faster, more stable and just plain better 23.

Thank you for your patience over the past few hours.

We’ve been preparing to upgrade 23 to entirely new hardware for quite a while. Back in the summer of 2008 we took the first step towards this by moving the current server park to Denmark. Over the fall we’ve been assembling bits and pieces of the new set-up, and in November we took Visualblog live on the new hardware.

Finally, the time has come for 23!

The consequence is that we’ll be offline for a few hours on Sunday March 15th from about 16:00 in Copenhagen. That’s 3pm in London, 11am in New York, 8am in San Fransisco and in between in other assorted places.