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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.

  Popularity: 16% [?]

This past Thursday evening, an ad hoc delegation of Irish high-tech entrepreneurs visited Brickhouse. They heard from Jumpcut entrepreneur and co-founder Mike Folgner, who now leads Yahoo! Video; from Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse, who spoke about some current projects and the process for selecting new ideas to build; and from Chad Dickerson, who reminisced about his recent visit to Dublin for Mashup Camp and spoke about the hacker-culture renaissance at Yahoo!. The visiting Irish were even treated to an unplanned photo op with Jerry Yang.

The group calls itself Paddy's Valley, and was founded for the purpose of visiting Silicon Valley and getting on the radar of VCs, influencers, and tech leaders at large Internet companies based in the Bay Area. Despite the fact that many of these startups compete for mindshare and funding, they figured that by banding together on a "trade mission" they could create a more likely scenario for being seen and heard. I found this example of purposeful real-world networking almost as intriguing as the business plans and product demos I saw.

Don't get me wrong, these young companies are building cool stuff. The pitches we heard were engaging and well-presented. Plus, members of the Paddy's Valley delegation had the noted charm of the Irish working in their favor. But the distinctly collaborative, emergent approach for gaining the attention of busy business leaders seemed almost as innovative as the product pitches themselves.

It was a great pleasure sharing beer and pizza (what else?) and gabbing on a rainy, wet December evening with the founders of startups creating niche social networks, mobile apps and content services, media-sharing sites, distributed storage services, and task-based verticals with social components for sports, travel, and more.

Check out the startups we learned about, the founders we met. And please let me know if I'm missing any "Padbrothers" or sisters:

• bench'd
• coclarity
• GlowDay
• MobaNode
• Nubiq
• pix.ie
• PutPlace
• RelevantM
• Toddle (from a Dublin design consultancy with a brilliant name, SpoiltChild)
• TouristR

Logo from bandon1. Used with permission from Conor O'Neill (bandon1).

Popularity: 12% [?]

In recent weeks I've been considering the difference between the implicit and the explicit -- in how we interact with information and and exchange attention online. I'm curious how meaning and pattern emerges from our actions, experiences, and designs. I credit last month's Defrag conference in Denver, and David Weinberger's thoughtful opening keynote with inspiring this line ot thought.

So, I was interested to see this topic come up a few days ago on a blog post conversation between two very smart people I work with, Bradley Horowitz and Gordon Luk.

Here are some tasty bits that caught my attention, but read the whole thread for your own illumination:

GetLuky: My personal viewpoint is a bit more nuanced. I believe that one day, web platforms will also be able to efficiently cluster their users based upon interests or tastes, similar to how Flickr can cluster tags to disambiguate meaning. These clusters will probably be designed not around user surveys or self-reported demographics, but instead will most likely be extracted through efficient methods of recording implicit participation information over the long term. There may well be a cluster (which I would belong to!) of folks that do enjoy Kung Fu monkeys, and there is almost definitely a cluster that find it degrading and offensive. The difference here between traditional preference filtering and clustered audiences is similar - one requires a great deal of potentially inaccurate user feedback about their preferences, whereas the latter acts more on implicit activity, and is thus more likely to produce the desired effects.

Bradley Horowitz: But in a world where “anyone can say anything to everyone at once”, our most precious commodity becomes attention.

I think my thesis is simply that in democratizing the creation of content, we’ve created a high-class problem… There’s too much “on”… 500 channels, maybe. 500M channels? Never. The flip side of this wonderful revolution in publishing, destroying the hierarchical pyramid of participation, is that we (our industry) have a burden to provide people the means of actually getting to the content they want to see… (Perhaps sometimes, even before they know they want to see it.) This ought to keep us busy for a lifetime or so…

GetLuky...In the short term, I think we’ll see some of these broad brush groupings of Internet users, and in the long term, perhaps we’ll get closer to the ideal of completely personalized information.

It does raise some interesting issues about all of our attention potentially getting stuck in ideological mindsets by design, if we don’t attain escape velocity from efficient subdivision of our population into lowest-common-denominator markets. But that’s a bit outside of the scope of this discussion.

Popularity: 8% [?]