Ever seen a completely flash-based instant messaging app? Check out http://www.flickr.com/ — I saw this and almost immediately thought: now this is one use for Flash that actually makes sense.



No emoticons, so for those who love their smilies then you’ll have to look elsewhere. Focusing on a more adult audience, smilies are probably overrated. Oddly enough, the Flickr TOS doesn’t provide for adult content.

Another downside is no built-in integration with Windows Explorer so you can drag and drop photos into the Flash IM window like you can do with Hello, but there is an optional tool that will add Flickr to your Windows Registry so an option is available to upload entire directories of photos to your Flickr account at one time. I was told in the Flickr main chat that you can mass tag groups of photos this way too, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet.



Flickr is in beta and offers 10MB of picture upload a month for free and so far only Google ads are being used on the profile pages [here’s my profile page] (this is similar to what textamerica is doing). You’ll note in the bottom right hand corner that each profile page has an RSS feed so folks with RSS readers (you all are using those now, aren’t you?)

They do have a pro account that you can only get once you in invite five of your friends/associates. I thought it was a bit odd that you couldn’t just buy the pro account, but I guess that’s coming in September. It was also rumored in the chat that it would be “very inexpensive” when it came out. The pro account offers essentially more storage, retrieval and convenience.



With the advent of newer digital cameras and picture sizes being rather large uncompressed, the 10MB limit seems to me would be rather easy to get to unless an interim compression step was made as Flickr charges in their monthly upload limit the full size of the pic and then compresses on the server. 10MB is a ton of pictures that are compressed, but not a ton when you are talking uncompressed, so this is something to consider.

As for blogging, you can setup to send along your shared photos automatically to your blog by following a step-by-step walkthru in the browser. Basically you fill out a form and give them a little bit of info about your blog (where’s it’s located, username, etc) and then it uses the BloggerAPI (other API are supported as well) to send the photo automatically to the blog. If you are sheepish about giving out your blog password (I usually am) then you can opt to enter in the password each time you use the function.

Now, how adult webmaster friendly is Flickr? Their TOS has nothing specifically prohibiting sexually-explicit pictures and I learned in the Flickr chat that if you tag your pictures with “porn” then it will be taken off their main pages. (update: if you check the box that says it is “unsafe” — or three other people vote the picture as unsafe – then that will remove it from view) They do indicate though that “Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited.” but people in the Flickr chat mentioned they had seen corporate “pow wows” on there before, so who knows to what extent this is being enforced.

To satisfy the Ryze/Friendster/Orkut camp, a groups function exist, so you could create a Flickr group for your blog which is either a private group, public invite-only or open public group. Private groups are blocked from group searches and don’t display in profiles. Public invite-only groups show up but you have to get an invite to be able to join and open groups allow anybody to join. My blog group is open, so feel free to join: http://www.flickr.com/groups/makeyougohmm/

New users will find much to be pleased by the friendliness of the welcoming crew. I found it very easy to get up to speed within 30 minutes of what was going on thanks to an active and helpful Main Chat. The Main Chat is available via click on the lower right hand corner. When you first join you will find yourself being automatically invited into this channel and some very helpful and friendly admins will be there for your 20 questions. Well done!

All in all, Flickr impressed me. A few things that are quirky, sure, but it’s still beta and this is one service worth keeping an eye on. This is an example of how powerful and truly useful Flash can be. If I were to grade it as beta software (which I don’t really think is fair grading beta software) I’d give it a B+

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