Functional Flickr’ing in London

Last February (back when he still updated his blog) the Coffee Czar predicted that everybody would soon be talking about Flickr. I don’t how he got wise to Flickr, but a recommendation from the Coffee Czar is good enough for me, so I padded down the wire to Flickr and signed up for a free account. Even so, for a while I didn’t get what the big deal was. There are plenty of free photo sites out there. I’m already signed up for Ofoto. Why is this one different?

It’s different because they understand their model and they’ve done their usability homework. The model is sharing photos to build communities. They’re not trying to sell you photographic prints. They want you to use pictures as a means of interacting with others. This means making it easy to upload, tag, and share images is one of their most important objectives. Sure enough, it’s dead simple to do these things with Flickr.

Here’s a good example of the kind of fun thing you can do easily with Flickr. I can’t think of any other online photo service that would make this so pleasant:
London bus ticket machine, plus bus and bus user (to help explain the whole arcane process). Read all the little text boxes and you’ll get a whole story about life in London.

Now if we can only get the Coffee Czar to come out of blog limbo, maybe he’ll explain how he came across Flickr in the first place.