Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Flickr

First heard about Flickr here at Seth's Blog, so I decided to sign up for an account and give it a try.

Here are my observations:

1. Sign up is really easy. When you sign up you are choosing a screen name (like AOL instant messenger) that will be used on the Flickr sharing services. Bear that in mind if you are being creative.

2. All of the demographic info (at least at this point) is optional.

3. There is no stand-alone application; everything that Flickr does operates within a web window: photo uploads, viewing permissions, chats and conversations, etc.

4. You do not seem to be able to externally share your Flickr photos outside of the Flickr network. In other words, you cannot upload a photo and assign it an external URL that can be accessed directly.

5. There are different groups of people that you designate into groups. Those groups make up your permission list. It's that simple.

6. You can set up blog integration so that you can blog about photos that you've seen on Flickr. I am assuming that the blog displays the picture (haven't tried it), so maybe I'm wrong about number 4 above.

Conclusion: It's another social networking site, but perhaps it's more useful than some of the others. Imagine having your whole extended family online as part of your trusted group; instead of mailing out photos or even e-mailing, everyone could upload their photos for everyone else to look at and comment on. I don't really know if I want to share my pictures with complete strangers, but that's just me. Certainly worth checking out.

1 comment:

Caterina Fake said...

4. You do not seem to be able to externally share your Flickr photos outside of the Flickr network. In other words, you cannot upload a photo and assign it an external URL that can be accessed directlyAu contraire, mon frere! Flickr has been conceived of as a permeable membrane through which your photos can easily flow. You can put them on your sidebar like so, and you can post them to just about any blog as an inline image. Your social network is also transportable, because we've made the APIs transportable as well. We're still in beta, but we're getting better all the time. Check out the new notes feature, and tagging -- which adds metadata to your photos which makes them all easily searchable.