Flickr Photo Session

A decade back I had all my friends on the most popular messenger service at that time called the Yahoo Messenger. It was perfect, you could see all your friends who were online, and talk to them instantly. I was online 24 hours, even if I had to do with a 'slumber' mode for certain hours of the day. However, the craze came down as I got busier in life and also because call rates started a downward trend and handsets costs plunged, and everyone I knew started buying them. Also because there was competition from younger siblings like Google Talk and Rediff Bol (which was a crap product, IMHO) and Facebook, and I believe instant messengers, in general, became less popular as a means of communication with the oncoming of Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo Messenger has been on an evolution since its 1998 launch. It now integrates Facebook chat as well, and you can directly post to Facebook and Twitter, and chat from within your Yahoo Mail on your browser, and chat from within your smartphone.

It also had a Winamp plugin in the early 2000's that put the track you were then playing as your current status, and all your online friends would know what were you listening to, which is very similar to what Spotify will do to your Facebook feed, as my last post on Facebook's integration and new features talks about. That also includes simultaneous streaming of music (and videos, via an integration with Hulu and Netflix).

One of the very good Yahoo Messenger features was photo sharing that allowed you to share a photo album with your friend from your hard disk on your computer, which was later extended to sharing from your Flickr album. Both you and your friend could add photos to the photos panel and browse through them together while discussing them over chat.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced a feature (similar to Spotify-Facebook/Netflix-Facebook) for photos called Flickr Photo Session that lets you flip through photos with your friends across the world, at the same time allowing you to chat and discuss via a small component at the bottom right of the screen. Features over the initial Yahoo Messenger photo sharing are that you can add up to 10 contacts, and draw over the photos with a marker that comes in 12 colours.

What bewilders me is why did they take so long to implement this on Flickr? This was a very good idea, implemented 8 years back. They just had to present it inside-out, from photo-sharing-within-chat to chat-within-photo-sharing.

Anyway, while that is an interesting feature to help budding photographers discuss photos and exchange photography notes, it may not be a very useful tool for all of the 51 million Flickr users. Also, the feature is currently available only on the web version or the iPhone/iPad app.



In other Flickr news, they also introduced an official Android App (finally) earlier this week, though there already were around 1300 apps for Flickr out there in the market. Let us hope it starts allowing Photo Sessions sometime soon.