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My friend Flickr
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:19 pm on 2/12/2004
I hope I am the first and the last to use that joke. Anyway, the folks at Ludicorp, of whose ongoing effort to remake the MMPORPG I am a beta-tester and fan, released Flickr the other day.
Flickr is a photo-swapping and chat environment with excellent group-forming capabilities. It all happens in the browser, so there’s nothing to download provided you have Flash. It also incorporates instant messaging (although only within its big window) and an unusual level of granularity in its buddy list: you can have lots and lots of acquaintances, then upgrade up to 100 of them to friends, then 50 of them to Best Buddies, on up to Soul Mates. (I could be wrong on the numbers; much of this is imported from Game Neverending, which has different totals.) You can also see other peoples’ friends, and surf the friendship links between users.
Some well-connected folks in the social software sphere are calling Flickr the first social networking service that does something. I don’t agree – I think it’s the first great, useful social-presence app with a largely-useless SNS tacked on. It won’t be the last.
As much as I’m pulling for Ludicorp, AOL could smush this app flat by building onto AIM (if they could get their collective act together, which seems unlikely). Ludicorp, perhaps sensing this problem, has created a semi-open API with which others can build applications that make use of their users’ Flickr data (with permission and authentication, of course). My GNE buddy Jake has created the first of these, Reviewr, which fetches Amazon reviews written by your Flickr friends. This would be even more cool if it were accessible from within Flickr somehow, but still, as a hello world, it’s pretty damn alright. Flickr may yet become the first useful SNS, not by doing something, but by doing nothing and letting others do things.
There will still, however, be the context problem to deal with.