A couple of weeks ago Ryan wrote about Audioscrobbler, and we added a link to the Daily Ping group on the left hand side of the page. We both use Audioscrobbler and dig it. But there’s another tool whose link we added there which deserves just as much attention: flickr.
At first I wasn’t terribly thrilled with flickr. After all, I already have a photoblog where I put my photos up for 20 people to see – why would I want to do anything with flickr? Well, in short, flickr is really fun.
And I’ve talked for months about redesigning my personal site… but the features already exist in flickr. There’s keyword searching, comments, notes on photos (very cool), and tons of networking. In fact, the networking angle of the site is what makes it really sing: I can easily see the photos my friends and contacts have taken, comment on them, whatever… but I can also see the photos of their contacts easily. The whole thing is painless and, as I said, fun.
Uploading photos is pretty simple too. I use a plugin for iPhoto which lets me edit titles, sizes, and all that good stuff in the program… and then it’s whisked away to flickr. The only downside is that the free account (which I’m still using) has a limited amount of bandwidth available. So I uploaded something like six photos in December at full 4 megapixel size, and whoops, that was it for the month.
flickr also offers great tools for organizing and sharing photos, like the aptly-named organizr. It’s in Flash, but it’s one of the few Flash apps I actually like using. It lets you group photos, set permissions on who can view photos, and the like.
But the thing that made me really, really love flickr is this. There have been recent buyout rumors, suggesting that Yahoo! might scoop them up. This morning when I logged on, flickr had changed its logo:
Hilarious. Any company with that kind of sense of humor can’t be all that bad, right? (Plus, they’re Canadian!)
If you use flickr, you should join the still-tiny Ping group. Word. flickr is really great.
Posted in Technology