I have been a long time user of Flickr - well, long in the Web 2.0 sense of the word - in that I happened to stumble upon its initial release at the O'Reilly Etech conference three years ago. At that time, its numbers were pretty small but growing rapidly. Tim (who also attended Etech with me) was the only other person I knew on it, but we quickly spread the work to the folks we worked with.
Since that time, I've used flickr almost exclusively as my online photosharing tool of choice. On occassion, I've installed Gallery a time or two (for clients) as it affords a way of not being connected to the flickr community - which is a desireable thing for many schools. But, for myself, Flickr is one of those few sites I visit often - adding my own images and checking on the goings-on of my friends and their families. I even managed to get my 92 year old grandfather to add a comment or two to my photosets!
Beyond the sharing and commenting feature of flickr, I used it a couple of years ago when I vacationed in Peru. Of course, it was the primary repository for all my photos and served as a sort of real-time travel-blog. I didn't do a lot of blogging, but the ubiquity of Internet cafes in Peru allowed me to upload my photos almost as they happened. Friends back home were able to comment, etc. Prior to my trip, I used Flickr as a sort of 'travel agent' in that I started searching for various tags for locations (eg Lima, and so on) whereupon I not only got a preview of images, but was able to identify some locations I wanted to visit. More importantly, I came across some hostel operators who maintaned a flickr account and booked my first couple of nights in Lima essentially through Flickr!
Now, in page three of the my Flickr-Peru story, I received an email the other day from a fellow named Peter who manages a site called Columbus Collector . He had found my tagged image of a Columbus statue in Pisco and wanted to add it to his site. Sadly, I didn't have much additional information to provide him - it was down by the docks in a lonely and run-down part of Pisco but, at the time, I recall being somewhat pleasantly surprised to find a picture of CC.
Regardless, another interesting example of how Flickr and soccial networking tools can help exapand our own view about both the Internet and how real people can interact with technology.
So what should we do