The problem with Flickr
February 17th, 2005It's not really a "Flickr":http://flickr.com/ problem. It's a problem with the reaction to Flickr. Not even that, really. Sites are popping up all over the place doing interesting things with "tags" and images and blog postings and links and everything else under the sun. But, most of these services link directly to Flickr, or "Del.icio.us":http://del.icio.us/, or whatever ONE service it is that handles the data they are trying to provide. But that means that, if you don't use that particular service, then your images aren't included when all of these other services do interesting things with them.
What we need is a service like "feedster":http://feedster.com/ (or maybe feedster itself) to extract "tag" information from the feeds it indexes. Then, with this service actively indexing all of the Flickr feeds, and all of the Delicious feeds, as well as blog feeds and lots of other kinds of feeds from various sites, we're able to get a much greater supply of information when we try to find things tagged "hotdog", for instance.
Furthermore, in the same way that tags seem to work being governed by the public, each feed item could be categorized into a type (link, image, article, etc). With types and tags being indexed along side content from feed publishers around the world, the data becomes much more useful, and, despite how great a service like Flickr is, people aren't forced to use it if they want to be "in".
Just a thought.
