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Last week I discovered photophlow, a web app that some are describing as the reincarnation of Flickr Live. Photophlow launched quietly over the holidays and is still in invite-only beta, built by a startup worth watching called Oortle.

Photophlow lets you share your Flickr photos in real time and interact with photographers and their photos in a dynamic chat room environment that feels at times like a virtual world. The application embraces a collection of powerful APIs from a variety of popular services - Flickr (obviously), Twitter, Tumblr - and connects to the instant messaging client of your choice. Even the venerable Yahoo! Search term extractor manages to contribute to the playful ambiance.

Photophlow wires the social and the semantic together to create delightful, unexpected interactions between pholks and their photos. Encounters take place in the present tense, but are preserved and reflected back into the Flickr photostream of the participants as new metadata -- comments, contacts, collaborations. The phph experience amplifies the power of Flickr as an open platform: this app finds new ways to unlock walled gardens of sociability (you know the profile pages I'm talking about) and cultivates an environment where truly original media-sharing activity can flourish. Talk about hybrid vigor: it's now possible to tweet a photo. Or use a Flickr machine tag such as phlow:emote=doh to express an emotion. Or get an IM notification when something happens in your photophlow room.

Photophlow was created by a handful of people, led by Neil Berkman, a veteran software developer who's been building inventive social apps and thinking about "real-time media sharing" since the days of web 1.0; when social media buzzwords were a rare commodity, an open API was hard to find, and the social graph was barely a twinkle in Dave McClure's eye.

A bit of history (from Eric Costello, who was there making it): The original Flickr evolved from a web-based massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. (If you're a Flickr user and student of URLs, as I am, you've probably wondered about the .gne file ending you sometimes see on your travels through Flickr. Now you know.). Along the way to becoming the world-class photosharing site it is today, Flickr was a flash app that let you chat about shared photos in real time. Back then, none of this interaction was preserved asynchronously. As Flickr evolved in response to feedback from the lively community it attracted, the Flash app was retired indefinitely, and "Flickr Live" as it was called, lived on only in the dreams and schemes of a few active and inventive early members.

Neil had the good fortune to hook up with one of these passionate ringleaders -- Bryan "striatic" Partington, one of the early flickrati and a longtime advocate for real-time Flickr. Striatic proved to be the perfect co-conspirator -- an antic photo poet in a bowler hat, a skilled UI designer, and natural born storyteller. They collaborated on photophlow for over a year before meeting face to face. This past fall, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit, they showed their project to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and he gave it his blessing. Photophlow the phenom has just begun.

You can learn lots more about photophlow from the following resources:
• eHub interviews photophlow
• Demo Girl: 3 Words Describe PhotoPhlow: Totally. Freaking. Addicting.
• PhotoDump 01-13-2008

  There's also a photophlow group on Flickr to explore.

  NOTE: Here at next.yahoo we have a dozen a few photophlow invites left to share. Leave a comment and let us know if you want one.

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