Like any good Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is trying to figure out what the heck is going on …. online, and looking for great examples of companies that are doing things right.
I could not agree more that Flickr is a stunning example of how to get the new internet right. The photo handling is superb, the interface is easy and intuitive, the tools are powerful, the basic service is free, the buzz is friendly and cordial throughout the site, and perhaps most importantly it’s easy to share photos and intergrate them with blogs.
No wonder Caterina Fake was hanging at Davos this year!
Joe Duck 
Flickr got me from “try the freebie” to “sign up for the pay service” in record time.
There are interesting trends in computing these days; a lot of data is moving back towards central repositories. The major driving factors I see are (a) ability to share (b) location transparency (c) security and data integrity. Ordering of a/b/c differs depending on the data and the service, of course.
RE: Paying – Me too, and I’m a lot cheaper than you!
Tim O’Reilly was also talking about the importance of robust centralized storage (and even application servers as with web mail). The cool thing is that the storage costs are low and getting lower, so it does not appear that centralization will lead to monopoly or price problems. I think transparency remains a very pressing problem – there are a lot of black boxes out there and a huge amount of personal info is pouring into them.
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/01/1754213.shtml
Flickr rumblings with Yahoo forcing users to have a Yahoo ID to use Flickr. This pretty much affects the original Flickr users…
Joe have you seen
http://www.box.net
It looks pretty cool to, for many things…they have a decent API to integrate to as well.
Your right Joe…flickr is handy! 🙂
Glenn – Box.net is new to me but really looks like a great idea.