Flickr Toys

What fun! I love that so many users have devoted their time to creating fun and exciting tools that other Flickr users can make use of for their own enjoyment. This is one of the great things about Web 2.0 technology in my opinion: Users take the services in new and perhaps unanticipated new directions, creating new functionalities along the way and making the tools living, growing entities rather than letting them stagnate. These piggyback tools not only allow users to expand upon the original service in creative ways, they also offer new opportunities for their creators to potentially profit from them in ways that were not possible in the Web 1.0 model.

Tagging with Flickr

Tagging is one of the features that sets Flickr apart from other photo sharing sites because it allows users to categorize the images in ways that make sense to them which, in theory, facilitates access and retrieval of those images. Of course tagging lacks the authority of a controlled vocabulary, but this is somewhat mitigated by the idea of a tag cloud which emphasizes frequently used tags over those that appear only sporadically. The result is a kind of democratized naming authority that may make use of terms and phrases not traditionally found in controlled vocabularies. Though Flickr is not the only means of collaborative photo sharing, it is certainly one of the simplest to use and has the added benefit of being one of the more popular sites. This means that more images are available to use and tag, and this is undoubtedly better for all users.