The crew over at Flickr have just released a new product, Flickr Places. It aggregates together photos, photographers, and groups around certain geographic areas.
You can type in “Florence, Italy” and seconds later you’ll be flipping through the most interesting or most recent photos for that area. I have to say this is way cool! I’ve already spent two hours tonight just flipping through photos in various parts of the world.
My journeys have taken me to:
I have seen some really amazing photographs. Plus I think I have my next 30 years of vacations planned out. :-p
This reminds me a lot of when I was growing up and my dad and I would surf on telnet. It was a game to see how many different Web sites in different countries we could see in an evening. The Web gave me the ability to see a world beyond my own.
I can totally see Flickr Places being used by people all over the world to get excited about areas or places that they’ve never been before and maybe even make connections with people they’ve never met before.
Also… I could totally see someone seeing a place on the news like Baghdad and wanting to see more photos from that location.
Oh oh oh… there’s one things I forgot to mention. Flickr also has this new map view which displays the keywords of what people are taking pictures of in that region.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 