My Friend Flickr

 I came across this interesting post about Flickr on the Design Observer website in which Jessica Helfand heaps praise on the photo sharing site:

"... Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It's a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a culture — and it's a brilliant example of socially networked software because it's free, its easy, and it makes sense. It also capitalizes on the great strengths of mobile computing, which is to say you can engage in all sorts of computational activities while being, well, mobile. Put simply, Flickr lets you upload photos, then helps you organize them, sequence them..."

I was half way through the article before I noticed that it was written in 2005, early on in the history of the site.  In that same time frame, digital had still not totally steamrollered analog and Helfand pointed to one of the weak points in digital camera design then.

Helfand has produced an astounding number of essays about design issues over the years; I thought her last post on an exhibit about typography, Type is (More Than) Image, was particularly nice.