Gosh, people just can’t stop talking about Flickr this week and we feel compelled to override our customary restraint yet again and tell you about it. This time it’s the big Canadian paper, The Globe and Mail, with its article Flickr offers snapshot of where the Web’s headed by our new best friend, technology pundit Donald Melanson:
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.
OK, OK, this is making us blush. But there’s even more that we’re obligated to crow about! The redoubtable Tim Lauer wrote about us on eSchool News, where he describes Flickr: Photo Sharing and Community Building and the geektastic XML.com‘s Bob DuCharme goes so far as to start an article with the following lines: I love the free picture-sharing website Flickr. I love how I can upload pictures and add as much or as little descriptive metadata as I wish — warming the cockles (cockles?!) of our geektastic hearts.
But you know what really is the cockle-warming best? When people like Kareem write such nice things about us on their blogs.