Writing Assignment 8- Flickr

Flickr

http://flickr.com/

The web application Flickr is where anyone can manage and share their online photographs. Flickr works with Microsoft and uses the Windows Live Photo Gallery. The Windows Live Photo Gallery makes it an easy way to get your photos off of your camera, tag them, make simple corrections, and then upload them to Flickr. Flickr has two main goals, the first goal is to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them and as a way to do this Flickr get photos into and out of the system in as many ways as it can. The second goal of Flickr is to enable new ways of organizing photos. Like photo albums Flickr allows you to organize your photos in a collaborative way. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos along with adding comments, notes and tags.

As a person who has never used Flickr my first impression was that I liked the site’s design. The site's design is very simple with no clutter. It helps first time users and account holders to find things easily. There are only a couple of advertisements on site pages which is also nice. I don't enjoy being bombarded with advertisements. One important aspect of the site is that it can give you a tour of the different applications Flickr is capable of.

The main social aspects of Flickr are that it is a community of many types of people, and the creators of Flickr want users to share. One aspect of this is that Flickr categorizes photos as a way for people to come together according to their interests. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and a discussion board for talking. Flickr allows account holders to share blogs that contain pictures and captions. The site also allows outside views to get an idea of what the web application is like by showing some of the most interesting photographs found on Flickr.

I found the site to be very interesting and it could be very beneficial for someone who took hundreds of photographs. Flickr also allows users to be creative; you can simple print your photographs or create calling cards, photo-books, slide show-DVDs, postage stamps, etc... Flickr is definitely a useful and creative web application.