flickr

="The best way to store, search, sort, and share your photos"=

Flickr is an online photo sharing community that allows individuals to post and share images that are themselves, or images that they find interesting, or just simply images that they took. This simple photo sharing website or web service is similar to wikispaces, in a sense that it is also an online community platform, which is generally considered an example of a Web 2.0 application. Today, it is evident that the abundant resources on the interent have become well integrated into our daily lives. The trend that lies within the internet itself today is the founding glory of web communities. People have found interest in online networks such as facebook, myspace, livejournal, xanga, hi5...etc. Why is it that these web online communities have become so popular? Well, online communities allow people to connect and share interests and most importantly it has become a new trend and hobby for people to go out and post personal thoughts, images, friendship, essentially people connect, explore and create networks within themselves. Likewise, Flickr has become a popular web site that is run by a network of people and users to share personal photographs. This service has become a wide interest by bloggers as a photo repository or storage place. Flickr's popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed for personal and entertainment means

=**History**= Flickr was first founded in 2000 by Ludicorp, a Vancouver Canada based company. Ludicorp launched Flickr in Februrary 2004. The service emereged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based multiplayer online game. Flickr proved to be a more realistic project, and ultimately Game Neverending was pushed to the side. Initially, Flickr focused on a mutltiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. Emphasis was placed on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by the users, uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, interestingness, marking photos as favorites, and group photo pools. Like many small online communities, Ludicorp and Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005. On May 16, 2006 Flickr updated its services from Beta to Gamma along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "Gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release. = =

=Functions:= Essentially the main function that makes Flickr standout is its ability to allow photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword "tags" (form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concering a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user generated tags, Flickr has been noted and repeated cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomyand the first websites to implement tag clouds. Users are also allowed to categorize their photos into "sets" or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. Sets are more flexible than the traditiona folder -based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to more than one set. Organizr is a web application for organizing photos within a Flickr account. It allows users to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings, adn to place photos on a world map (conjunction with Yahoo Maps). Uses Ajax to closely emulate the look, feel, and quick functionality or desktop-based photo management applications.Flickr provides both private and public image storage. Users uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private. Private are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family (Wikipedia). Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private then all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public then the photo becomes public as well. Likewise, similar to wikispaces, only members that are admitted into a group are allowed to make edits. Therefore, the process of privacy is highly integrated the use of online community webspace.Flickr relies on HTML and HTTP fetuares, allowing a broader compatibility among platforms and browsesr. The benefits of using Flickrs is that you have unlimited storage point (to a certain degree that is). Images can be posted to the user's collection vai e-mail attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and applications with e-mail capabilities. Flickr has increasingly been adopted by many web users as their primary photo storage site, especially members of the weblog community. In addition, it is popular with Macintosh and Linux users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the Windows/Internet Explorer architecture to work (Wikipedia). It is evident that online community sharing has continously become an expanding industry on the internet. Consumers and producers are interested of building a concrete network that is based on personal interest and entertainment. Neverthless, examples mentioned above such as Facebook, Hi5, and livejournal are examples of online sharing community and activities that have become highly integrated into our daily lives.

= = =References:= "Flickr" Wikipedia. 2006. Online http://en.wikipedia.org/wikiFlickr "Flickr" Flickr. 2006. Online http://www.flickr.com