It’s taken some time, but I finally got around to posting some of my pictures toFlickr and the whole thing is just superb. For those of you uninitiated, Flickr is a photo service which enables you to post your photos online and organize them any way you please. You can probably post your photos on any old site, but the organization capabilities with this product are just killer. They operated as a stand along company for like 42 seconds before Yahoo came along and saw what an amazing job they’d done and quickly acquired them and have largely left the service alone, knowing a good thing when they see it.
What really gets me giddy, however, is the ability for me to tag and title my photos and share them with friends, family and the general internet. For example, the current slideshow viewer I’ve been using in the past (skillfully built by my friend Dan), is an excellent vehicle for easily posting a series of photos. What it lacked, though, was the ability for me to comment on certain pictures, which can be a big factor. Certainly some photos speak for themselves, but others may have a small anecdote that is just required for the viewer to understand the context. Flickr allows that. Not only that, but Flickr offers you the ability to search for any photo that has been posted to the site by anyone. So if you want to see a bunch of pictures of panda bears, just type it in and you got it, submitted by people just like you and me. Great stuff.
Oh – one more thing. This isn’t to say that Dan couldn’t have done some tweaking to make me able to comment on my photos in the slideshow template he designed – I’m pretty sure he could have done it in his sleep, in fact, but he’s building real websites! Not Rustedrobot…..heh.
Anyway, check it out. That graphic on the left there is a small sampling. So here’s my Flickr page, which is organized and tagged and commented and everything. It’s in its infancy stages right now, but I’ll be eventually be adding tons and tons more soon.
The next generation web applications continue to blow my mind……there’s so much great stuff out there and the degree of innovation is really spectacular. Bloglines, for instance. I simply cannot live without Bloglines, which every internet user in the world should be using. Simply put, why go from website to website to website to website when you can have all those websites content collected in this single web-based application and updated for you each time those sites get updated? No brainer.