Once upon a time, Flickr was just an experimental part of Game Neverending. Then it was a full blown society, full of interesting people who happened to express their interestingness through photography. Digital photography was new then, and special, and there was some first flush of enthusiasm for having a system that "got it".
Time and space happened, and Flickr became part of Yahoo. A piece of the fun drained out, and the Internet got bigger. Digital photography got more ordinary, and the camera I carry around everywhere felt more and more like a crappy camera and not like something I could capture the essence of the world with.
I'm at a point where I could easily take a photograph every day and send it somewhere. Should Flickr be that place? Will the time come not too soon when I will want to be a refugee from it, downloading my photos in the hopes that I can re-upload them somewhere else, tags and annotations intact and some fragment of society reconstructed around them?
I loved Flickr once, in the way that I'm sure that people once loved Compuserve. There is still a Game Neverending to play with photographs, but I don't know yet where to play that game.
