Flickr

If you were spared from my mass invitation/spam the other day, then you might not be familiar with Flickr. Currently in public beta and developed by the gents and ladies at Ludicorp, Flickr is, as they say, "the best online photo management and sharing application in the world", and I totally agree.

It's easy to pinpoint why I feel the need to devote an entire blog entry to it. More than anything I love the simplicity. Undoubtedly technically complex, the clean, organized design and process flow doesn't hint that on the backend runs some hardcore server architecture and years worth of programming efforts. And it shouldn't anyway, since it just works extremely well (despite being a public beta release) and that's what matters most to it's end users.

And it's the end users for whom the site has been built. There's a great community vibe going on that you don't often find, and I think the idea of sharing something personal like photography is partly why. You can tell that those involved in it's development are driven by passion and not to earn a paycheck. They're all Flickr users themselves, and they've implemented some integration/portability/customization web application features that their competitors wouldn't even have dreamt up yet, only to provide a better service for themselves and their customers. I'm not naively suggesting that they're not trying to earn a living from all of this, just that you feel above anything that they've got their customer's interests at heart. Like how Google made you feel before they unleashed their ad programs.

It's unfair to gripe about something in public beta, but their general layout should really be using CSS instead of tables. Because, you know. Otherwise, I've been playing around on the site for the past few days and it's fast becoming a favourite. Take a look at my profile and photos (some of which aren't up at digicam.coza).

I'm thinking about using Flickr to host travel photos while I'm backpacking, since my digicam gallery is less suited to that kind of random, ad-hoc update plan. In fact, along with favouring Ben's dynamic flash albums, I've even started to reconsider the redesign of digicam.coza altogether.

Don't miss the popular tags page to see what others are doing with Flickr. With a free account you're limited to three photo sets and 10mb/month. It remains to be seen how much upgrading will cost.