I joined Flickr, the photo-sharing site, when it was still based here in Vancouver. The year 2005 is surely a long time ago in the online world. I began to think of it as just an old reliable place to store pictures. Flickr may have been one of the very first examples of a Web 2.0 app. That phrase was coined to mean a site which relies on its members to contribute the content and therefore value. Thankfully, after Yahoo bought the site they didn't allow it to become too marginalized. Over the intervening years, Flickr remained the gorilla of its online genre, but it failed to keep up with the social networking aspects of what the Internet has become.
Click this image to visit a Flickr collection of where I teach.
Yesterday Flickr moved forward about five years in one fell swoop. I loaded the new Android app on my tablet and began using the site in ways I never have. I never saw much value in
following others. Yet just in the last 24 hour, I must have added twenty new Flickr contacts. The romance is back; the bold design makes it a fun place to go. The version on my phone now edits photos much better than Instagram. Flickr is again exciting and I am now ashamed of my little affairs with other photo-sharing sites.
