Vancouver-based Ludicorp's photo-sharing/social networking service Flickr is all the rage with shutterbugs. But it's also contributing to something much more significant: an evolution of the Web that could change the way people use on-line sites.
Flickr (www.flickr.com) is what's known as a web service or web application — something between a website and a regular software program. Web services have long been seen as the future, but until recently they've been held back by technical limitations. Now the combination of faster computers, better development tools and greater access to broadband is making them a reality. Some have even taken to calling this new trend the Web 2.0.
It's easy to see why people are excited about the possibilities of services such as Flickr. Parts of Flickr look a lot more like a desktop application than a web page, but no special software needs to be installed on the computer and nothing is dependent on a particular operating system. Flickr works whether you're using a Mac, Windows or Linux — all you need is a web browser.
When a photo is uploaded to Flickr it becomes a part of a network, connected to other photos in the database by their subject or their relation to you. This means photos can be organized or browsed in a number of ways and shared with others easily, instead of being limited to the predefined personal albums offered by most desktop or on-line photo services. In other words, Flickr treats digital photos as what they are, digital objects on a network, rather than like pieces of paper in a book.
For example, each time a person logs on to Flickr they're greeted with the newest photos their contacts want to share. Dig a little deeper and they can browse a collection of photos (their own or ones others have shared) by keywords or groups they belong to.
The photo-organizing process is collaborative, too. When you see a photo with missing information, you can add a note or tag to it — and others can do the same for your photos. Flickr is also an extraordinarily connected application. It can receive photos straight from a camera phone and post them directly to a weblog (or blog), for example. Users can chat with others on-line and exchange photos in real time.
Since launching earlier this year, Flickr has received widespread acclaim in tech circles and become a darling of the so-called “blogosphere” or blog community, which accounts for a sizable chunk of its user base. While the company is keeping the precise number of registered users close to its chest, it says the system has more than 100,000 members and is growing at a rate of about 2 per cent a day.
Even Flickr's creators seem a bit surprised at its rapid success.
“It took us a while to establish exactly where we were going with Flickr,” says Ludicorp president Stewart Butterfield. “Now it is growing so fast, it's hard to imagine how we can grow the company fast enough to take on anything else.”
While Flickr is a niche service, the ideas behind it could have an influence on the development of the Web as a platform for shared programs and hosted services.
“[It] is certainly something we believe in,” Mr. Butterfield says. “As for our role, though I don't want to boast, I do think at this stage we're doing a lot to show people how it's done.”
If a true version 2.0 of the Web, based on shared applications and data, remains a few years away, Flickr is apparently contributing to the early beta testing.
Special to The Globe and Mail
