A Flickr Moment at WWDC
One of the things that always amazes me about Flickr is the number “small world” coincidences I’ve encountered while using it.
For example, a little while ago, I posted a photo of St. Ignatius Church here in San Francisco, and remarked in the caption that “If [the fairly obscure British band] The Clientele ever hold an album cover competition, this will be my entry.” Not long after that, a woman who evidently is a friend of the band added it as a favorite. Another time, I posted a photo from a Doves show I saw at SXSW this year, and got comments from someone else who had attended the show and someone else who had been a stagehand. And yet another time, I posted some photos I took during a completely spur of the moment trip to Las Vegas, only to discover through Flickr that Mike Merrill from Panic was there at the same time.
Now, I was browsing through my friend Mike Smochko’s photos on Flickr and noticed that he had posted a photo he took from high up on a balcony while The Wallflowers played at this year’s WWDC Campus Bash. Later, while I was browsing through Dan Dickinson’s photos, I noticed he had posted a shot of Mike, and my other co-workers Joshua Benjamin and Andrew Wooster up on the balcony.
The cool thing is, this kind of thing is only likely to become more common as Flickr grows. It’s not hard to imagine people in the near future tuning into Flickr streams for far more detailed, grassroots coverage of events than the traditional media could hope to provide (I already do, to some extent). As someone said in the comments on one of my photos, Flickr is turning into world glue.
June 11th, 2005 at 11:18 am
Yeah, that’s really cool. However, something like Flickr is really at its full ability in a place like CA, seeing as how you Silicon Valley people seem to be so closely knit.
But, that’s not to say that all of your cool incidences occurred because of your location. I think you’re right - as Flickr grows it’s going to be a very common thing to see all of these “connections”, etc. I’ll tell you this much, though - things like this will strive us to be better photographers!
June 11th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
I’m pretty sure that I found that flickr photo though a capture of the web traffic coming to the bands site (and I did like it a lot - very clientelesque) but what I thought was oddly coincidental was that I had read your blog several times before that because of del.icio.us links! And, as you can see, I still read it now. Three cheers for internet glue!
June 11th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
I, too, thought the reverse angle thing between my picture and Mike’s was an amazingly cool coincidence; scarily, I’ve since had other odd coincidence comments, like this one.
I love Flickr as world glue; I can only hope more people get into it and learn how to tag properly so more of these coincidences can be found. It allows for quick ad-hoc communities discussing, well, anything - like WWDC.