If Flickr was crack for shutterbugs… this is why you would go Pro

photophlow is the super concentrated crack filled with chocolate and then drenched in ambrosia that you get paid for even thinking about… ok, maybe that is a bit over the top. But this tool is an amazing addition to the mashups that surround flickr. Yahoo bought up flickr as likely as not to gain access to a strong community and through the commenting (that was there before) allows people to explore and comment on the work of others. But this has been asynchronous and largely a slow process. The time that it took to get exposure to a photo was, or could be, significant. The community element was something that would give some incentive to purchase the Pro account to give/get more exposure and store more images.

But now, this all can happen in real time with people interested in a wide range of photography, facilitating faster feedback to the work that you have posted. But because things happen much quicker, all of the sudden, you have a reason to go pro. I’m thinking Yahoo should give these people a massive cheque pretty quick.

So, why would your average Jack/Jill be interested? I’m not sure, unless they want to learn… and being an edtech blog… this is the kicker for me. This system allows you to create your own rooms, creating a great learning environment that would allow a group of students to collaborate on an assignment (photo or art based) or for an instructor to provide feedback to student work.

Now this is not the first, and it won’t be the last collaboration system for photos or any other kind of content, but the big difference here is the nature of the interface. It works very well for images, just as wikis are ideal for text, this, especially now that there are systems/accessories that will allow automatic uploading of images to flickr, feels like a real milestone. You can now collaborate in real time without investing in a system to facilitate it.

Yeah, it’s certainly turned on lights and I had to rip myself away from it to write this and get on with my day. But as the closing comments… if you are teaching anything that deals with images and that would benefit from the conversation that might surround them, sign up for this system. Oh yeah, the developer is from Edmonton (I think).