My girlfriend and I had dinner at La Golondrina Cafe, our favorite spot on Olvera St. in down town LA. We were accompanied by Emily’s sister Michelle and her friend Maria.
I love Flickr - it’s an extremely well designed photo sharing site that caters to people who tend to be serious about photography, beginners and pros alike. But some people out there on the ‘tubes’ are determined to totally screw it up for everyone. Comment whores are threatening to turn Flickr into the myspace of photo sharing, complete with animated graphics.
One of the great organizational features of Flick are Flickr Groups. There are groups for everything - food, art, and nature photography for example. But recently a new form of group has arisen - the comment whore group. Comment Whore groups exist for only one purpose, to get as many comments as possible on your photos, even if each of those comments contain the very same text. One of the worst and most pathetic examples of a Flickr Comment Whoring group is the “Global Village 2” pool. Basically, it works like this - you are required to comment on 5 other photos in the group (using a canned message) for every one photo you add to the group. You even get a “friendly warning” from one of the goups lackeys (these comment whores are on top of things!) if you delay or otherwise neglect your comment whoring quota. There are now many such groups that exist solely for this type of aberrant behavior, the result of which are Flickr pages (this one and this one) that are full of ugly, annoying animated gifs, empty and meaningless comments, and tacky “award” icons.
Google is doing something thats a little rare when it comes to technology companies (especially telcos) - it’s making a savvy business move thats both good for Google AND the consumer. Quite frankly, it’s capitalism in it’s most glorious form. Follow the link above.