Flickr Launches Places
Flickr has finally gotten around to rolling out their new Places feature. Essentially it’s a profile page for locations, letting you dig deep into both local photographers, and pictures taken around landmarks that have been matched up either by name, or geotags.
Anytime people add their photos with the correct geography (something that’s done through Flickr’s organiser tool) the most recent shots will appear on the page. Each places page also links up with other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Weather, to show you what the local time and temperature is, alongside a more detailed map.
Speaking of maps, Flickr has tweaked them too. Instead of browsing locations with a series of pink blobs like it used to, it’s now a smattering of the latest tags that show up where the shot was taken. There’s also a new shuffle button that refreshes the page with new content. Any time you click a tag, a small series of photos called the "ribbon" pops up below, letting you play the most recent or interesting shots just like a slideshow.
The move appears, in part, to direct people towards the new city pages, as viewed photos in the map are small thumbnails. Personally, I preferred the old style, as you could zoom down to city level and pick out shots by location. While you can still do that by using the integrated search tool, gone is the exploratory mode with zooming features that made it a more compelling way to browse.
While the updates may be small, the new places pages seem to me to be the early stages of more advanced user profiles on the service. Flickr’s current user profiles haven’t changed much since the service launched, and the new setup seems like a much clearer way to layout the same types of information you’ll find on user pages like photostreams, groups and tags. While the old profiles aren’t necessarily limited, to me it seems like the next logical step towards adding some additional networking and sharing features.
