A few days ago I learned via a post by Ted Leung about a new tool for
all you Flickr fans out there. Think about Photophlow as a chat room, where everyone
in the room can use a common search and then promote photos to be
shown to everyone in the room.
It completely operates on the Flickr-API, so you don’t need a separate account there which will also provide you with your user icon on Flickr being your avatar in the chat. You can comment a photo right within the chat, too, which results in a label besides your comment that shows that you’ve created the comment while being in a Photophlow room.
If you administer a group on Flickr, you can also create its own chat room on Photophlow for this group. Given the high level of interactivity the whole service provides, it only makes sense to split the whole environment into subgroups since otherwise the promoted photo would change on a 25fps framerate ;-) So far the biggest room had usually something around 15 users while staying comfortable.
In general the whole service looks like a really nice idea, which would have been way to complicated to realize as a pure IRC service. I esp. see it as a great way to first of all find new photos by collectively browsing through the archives on Flickr but also for reviewing shots as well as training new photographers.
This might also be a nice addition for Photowalk.at, to easier discuss photos after a walk. Here it would perhaps be nice, if the service would allow some automated refreshing of a stream to allow people to comment photos when they come in with the source being for instance a group’s pool.
Currently the service is in private beta, but you can easily request an invitation right on the frontpage :-)
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂