Two, linked postings have made me think more about Flickr — one by Peter Merholz and the other by Thomas Vander Wal.
Two things stand out for me in Peter Merholz's post: 'Those sites that truly succeed on the web do so because of a fundamental appreciation of what "the network" brings. Amazon, eBay, and Google being the biggest, shiniest examples. They get that the network, with its constituent elements of people doing things, and through those activities somehow connecting to each other (whether it's direct, as in items on eBay, or indirect, as in different people buying the same product on Amazon, linking to the same page in Google), they get that that connection is meaningful, exceedingly meaningful, and if you can leverage that behavior, you can provide an experience orders of magnitude more interesting than when you ignore that connectedness'; (unlike a MMPORG, Flickr) 'provides joy through its multiple perspectives on reality' — yet play is important to the experience of Flickr.
Thomas Vander Wal picks out certain (innovative) features of Flickr as significant for the way the web might develop: it's a 'social network that makes sense' ('As physical space gets annotated with digital layers we will need some means of quickly sorting through the pile of bytes … to get a handful that we can skim through. What better tool than one that leverages our social networks'); it's a tool that extracts something of an individual's "vocabulary" for things ('metadata tools that add text-addressable means of finding objects').
I have been "playing Flickr" since about July and I feel I am only just beginning to make use of many of its features. Finding photographs (out of interest or for specific purposes) via RSS feeds, or taking pot luck and exploring various tags (the tag suggestions that Flickr throws up during this process are themselves a remarkable feature of the site — very clever) has been both intuitive and great fun. Then there's the ability to create groups (social, work-related, topic-focused …): this is a very powerful feature and I have recently started exploring these, socially and for work. Couple all this with a project like 43 Things (can Basecamp come on board, too?), with weblogs (as here) and you begin to have something that is very powerful indeed. Using Flickr is influencing my choice of phone (coming to upgrade time). Much, much more importantly, I can begin to see how it can be put to use to effect vital social missions.
Update: I failed completely to highlight the excellent discussion threads in the Flickr forums and groups. Here's one that bears on some of the points above:
Pandarine: If someone still has the impression that Flickr is less of a community than Fotolog, please get involved in the active groups, and don't just wait for people stumbling across your fabulous work! You can get assignments, be creative or use your imagination, dream, learn something, discuss, share your life, laugh, cry, participate in group hugs, communicate without language barriers, or simply show off your work in the hundreds of specialty groups! Lots of us spend most of their time with hits like flashlight and squared circle. There is a birthday list, a workshop, a place to share your recipes - or you can privately show your wedding pictures exclusively to Grandma Polly and Auntie Bertha and wait until someone comments them. After all it's your choice! Note: These groups are randomly picked, and my list is not intended to be discriminating against the many other fabulous groups on this website. There is so much going on in this community, I can hardly keep up. So please don't ever tell me again that there is "lack of community" in Flickr - or I'll make the list even longer. That's a threat, not a promise ;-)
Zen: To me immediacy of this site has been tempered with an understanding that this is more than a photo storage site... in fact, it began as a cross between a technologically aware social-interaction environment and a sort of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon to use an ancient term) and is much more a collection of people whose thread is the visual image. That sounds more cerebral perhaps, but here is also the capacity for emotion and compassion along with thought and responsibility beneath the HTML.
And one final update (2.1.2005)! Credit for the "Flickr-is-like-a-MMPORG" idea goes back to a posting at giantant.com (well worth reading). And I ought to have thrown in Mappr here as another amazing development — made possible by Flickr:
Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found online, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.
Mappr takes advantage of the cornucopia of descriptive information provided by Flickr's users to organize their photos. Flickr's admirable policy of openness with its data provides a way to anticipate and envision a future where cheaply-available GPS technology generates this placement as a matter of course. There's no reason to wait for this technology to become common; by mapping the millions of photos that Flickr makes available, we can start looking at its broad scale potential now.
There's a public Mappr group at Flickr (with feeds and project updates).
