One of the many fascinating things about all this exciting new technology is how its uses emerge and converge. My first thought about flickr was that it was just like facebook, only less useful because it doesn't allow so much comment and is not as easy to use or quick to load. "Easy to use" comes with experience I guess, but I spent 10 minutes trying to get Wags' "bookr" thing to load, without success - well beyong my usual patience level. I solved one problem, my pop-up blocker, but it still didn't work. Call me old-fashioned but I believe that technology should be easy, simple and intuitive to use - I was incandescent with rage when the nongs who replaced our perfectly adequate email system with Lotus Notes brightly suggested we all go on a two-day course to learn how to use it. One could easily spend all one's time learning how to use technology and not actually doing anything productive with it. I don't want to use any basic device that needs two days of training. Even if I had two days to spare. I never needed two days of training to use a telephone...
Anyway, back to flickr, which is the focus of this week's activity - yes i did find some interesting stuff on it and can see that it is actually different from FB (facebook). Presumably it's an advertising-based business model - the old interruption marketing philosophy - but I guess it works, for the time being at least. Since I'm getting very tired of the silly applications on FB used by many students and kids which are pure time-wasters (gosh how old do i sound??) - quizzes and the like - perhaps flickr will converge with FB, or move in to the space that it originally occupied. (I think FB was founded for class photos for students at Harvard.) Interesting to watch, anyway.
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