Flickr

I’m really enjoying Flickr — like del.icio.us, it took me a while to figure out exactly why I should care about it. Since I was never much of a bookmark user (no, I’m not sure why either), the whole notion of sharing bookmarks didn’t seem that useful to me. But after playing with it a bit, and especially after figuring out how to easily display my del.icio.us bookmarks on my blog, I got the hang of it. Really a fun tool, something that has lots of interesting directions to go.

When I first got a camera phone last year, I tried using TextAmerica, but both because AT&T’s rate plan disincented the use of the camera phone and because sending messages with the keypad was incredibly frustrating, I never really got into it. Once I got the Treo, that took care of both issues: Cingular has an unlimited data plan, and having a full keyboard (albeit a bit small) makes sending messages a snap.

Since so many of my friends were playing with Flickr, I checked it out again. Unlike services like Shutterfly (private online photo storage, printing and sharing), Flickr is public by default. Like del.icio.us, it supports tagging — which makes browsing across related photos pretty easy. It’s somewhat voyeuristic to look at what others are taking pictures of, but when the tag is a place (like Naperville) you see what’s going on in and around that place. You see pictures from our walk downtown yesterday (we’re not the only one checking out the street exhibits that just went out, like Ashton’s House — here’s another), a recent wedding, last week’s Memorial Day Parade, etc. Lots of fun.

As I discovered other friends who are using the service, I added them as friends (let me know if you’re using Flickr!) and now have an RSS feed of their pictures… so as friends upload their pictures to Flickr, they get delivered to me automatically. It’s a lot of fun to watch.

Sure wish there was a way to get my Flickr pictures into my grandparents’ Ceiva…