At Home with John and Debbie

At the dinner table the other day, Tom asked me “So what’s the big deal about Flickr?”. He’d been trying to get to grips with “Web 2.0″, and something he’d read held up Flickr as an example of what “Web 2.0″ is all about.

A little hint about “Web 2.0″ and “The Semantic Web”: lots of people think they know what it is, but they have different ideas about which ideas are most important, and the reality might be some ephemeral thing halfway between the union and the intersection of all those ideas. Good luck!

Anyway, a Thai restaurant table with 6 other people looking on wasn’t the best place to go into what’s good about Flickr, but it got me thinking.

I don’t need to explain what Flickr can do: they can do that themselves.

I think that what sets Flickr apart is that it is based around community. The minute I give a photo a tag, not only can I search for it, but it becomes part of massive collaborative pool of photos with that tagL: for example, photos tagged with bigwheel”. If they let me, I can even tag other people’s photos.

But that’s just the first step. As well as assigning tags, I can submit my big wheel picture to the Ferris Wheels group, where it will be looked at by people who like big wheels.

If I let them, any logged in Flickr user can comment on my pictures, and even annotate them with the “note” feature.

Flickr’s collaborative features allow people to make up novel uses. For example, the people in the DeleteMe group play a game whereby hopeful photographers submit pictures they believe to be good. Group members tag the pictures with either “deleteme” or “saveme”, and leave comments to explain their vote — if you reach 10 “saveme”s before you reach 10 “deleteme”s, your picture is very special indeed.

Things you do in Flickr are often visible to other users. I can mark any photo as a favourite. Other users can see what my favourites are (here are my favourites), and when I add a favourite, the photo’s owner gets a message to say it happened.

Flickr has a feature whereby a picture is given a proprietary and secret score called interestingness, which appears to be calculated on a combination of views, comments, how many people mark a photo as favourite, and other factors. This is, um, interesting, and it’s fun to see your own photos ranked by interestingness — but if you look at the daily explore page, which contains pictures with very high interestingness, I tend to find that the most “interesting” pictures are often very mainstream, polished works, which ironically I find usually find quite uninteresting.

Anything that can be presented as an RSS feed, Flickr does. A user’s photos, a search for a tag, comments on a user’s pictures, comments on an individual picture, a group photo pool — all of these can be viewed as an RSS feed, so you can use an RSS feed reader to get nudged when things happen. (Although people can’t agree on what Web 2.0 means, most of them will agree that RSS is involved).

Finally, a web browser isn’t the only way to interact with Flickr. By exposing a SOAP API, Flickr allows developers to write applications to manipulate Flickr in all kinds of novel ways. Colr Pickr is a great example.

Do you have other reasons Flickr is good, that I’ve missed? That’s what the comment box is for.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 17:41 and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.