* Flikr online photo sharing service
As Web applications become better understood and the cost of service drops, what the consumer gets is more for their money or indeed, more for nothing. Just look at Google’s Gmail for example (see editorial links below) which upped the bar for Web-based e-mail features and gigabyte storage.
While Google’s slow-but-sure pace toward world domination continues other companies are also following this same “biggering” trend (tip o’ the app to Dr. Seuss) in other Web application areas.
The particular area I have in mind today is photo sharing. There are a number of big players in this market, but there’s a new one called Flikr that stands out.
The company provides an excellent photo sharing service with free and for-fee levels with simple uploading, storage, sorting, searching and sharing of photos.
The Free Account has an upload limit of 10M bytes per month, no more than three photosets, and photostreams (a history of everything a user has uploaded) are limited to the 100 most recent images – any more than that and the excess will be hidden. And even though you might upload very large images, the stored images will be resized so the longest dimension is 1024 pixels.
The Pro Account plan ($41.77 per year) improves on this with a 1G-byte monthly upload limit, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited photosets, permanent archiving of high-resolution original images, ad-free browsing, and in a future upgrade, ad-free sharing.
Flikr supports photoblogs (Web logs with photos) along with posting via e-mail for cellphones with cameras.
Sharing includes being able to blog any public image on the system, creation of a Flikr Web address, a send-by-e-mail feature (either as an attachment or a link to the photo on Flikr), or as a “Flikr badge”, which pulls a photo from your Flikr account to embed in a Web page.
People can comment on your public photos or not as you prefer, you can create slideshows, “tag” photos to make searching more effective, have online discussions with other users … well, there’s a lot to this service.
Flikr is a well-organized, feature-rich service that should capture a large audience. Try it out and let me know what you think. You can even point me to your photostream!
**CORRECTION: In a Web Applications Newsletter, dated 02/21/05 and headlined “One-stop business with Smart Online,” an editorial error on my part resulted in a discussion of two companies with similar names, Smart Online and SmartCompany being mixed together in the same article. My apologies to both companies. I will be profiling each of the two companies in a future issues. – Mark Gibbs.
