I had a good day at work today. Playing around with Flickr like it was 2005 confirmed a couple of things:
- I love this product
- There are only a few products I’d like to work on holistically: Tumblr, Vimeo, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and Six Apart
All those products, in their own ways, are repositories of individual memories, made awesome by the connections formed by the community. They’re also very personal products, and by personal I mean they’re positioned in ways that encourage users to be creative. Self expression is really important and is the magic here.
If the 30-something me can sit down and have a conversation with the 12-year old me, I’d say “Hey, listen up for a minute. Stop running around for a sec. What do you want to do with your life? No idea? I suggest you look into archeology. And if you can’t handle the field work, maybe a position in comparative anthropology?”
“Oh and by the way, stop eating ice cream so much.”
I love history. I love the way individual stories become a communal story. And messing around with a product I work on so much in a different, freer and unbiased way today, I find that Flickr has a couple of awesome points compared to it’s peers. Flickr:
- Introduces a low entry threshold (expressive video still requires more effort)
- Centers around your original content; Tumblr’s content, for all its goodness, feels more like bookmarking and re-publishing and broadcasting to me.
- Benefits viz a viz blogs from the whole ‘photos tells a 1000 words’ thing
I spent a couple of hours going through the Organizr and re-categorizing sets and figuring out things that haven’t been classified. What I found was awesome. Flickr has been the pictoral blog of my life since 2005. The frequency in which photos exist analogous to my life have increased as mobile options become better and I’ve become more comfortable with a camera. I noticed friends who’ve dropped out of my life, discovered new friends who’ve entered my routines and found old friends who continue to be there. I dug up old images to go with my hazy memories, old photos to accompany half written blog posts and reimagined events properly because those photos existed.
Who knew I was into Taleb Kweli? I apparently was at a concert in NY once upon a time.
I usually read my old blog posts and get a kick out of it. My friend Nine has self-published her old posts, and it’s pretty awesome to see the stories that naturally form out of those archives. I never thought to do that review with with my Flickr photos, but I unwittingly did today. It spurred a lot of thoughts that needed to be fleshed out, but there was a sort of thrill there, a kind of primal excitement that only comes from a connection of events to a time and place and people.
So what’s missing? Context. Moar contexts. It’s about the stories, stupid.