Flickr description

www.Flickr.com

Flickr is an online photo management, organizing and sharing application. This hosting service for personal pictures and photo albums permits a rich sharing experience.
The Flickr’ users are able to get photos into and out of the system from the web, mobile devices, the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos. This service can be used to organize photos in a meaningful way, because the process of organizing can become collaborative. Under your permission your friends, family, coworkers and other contacts would be able to organize your photos - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags.
On Flickr, you can choose to make your photos either public to make the photos available to the viewers or private for your own closed social circle. You can create groups and albums within certain events, annotate pictures, adding captions within the frame, or post comments below other users’ photos. Most significantly, you can append "tags," adjectives that describe the photo’s category. And then, via those tags, share images with others. Then all of the photos that share a particular tag can themselves be explored as a group, which online pundits call a "folksonomy." Finally you can at least find beautiful, cool or intriguing photo for your collection or just desktop if you are not interested in uploading your own.
I would rate this technology a 5 out of 5 because of its “endless” amount of advantages listed above. In addition I’d like to mention that the usage of the web site is free of charge; it is well designed and very easy to use, including searching, posting information, uploading and sharing photos.
I think that Flickr can definitely improve organizational communication. It gives the users the ability to share photos for a variety of purposes. Uploading pictures from corporative events or important conferences by employees or managers is an effective way to express the organizational culture and create a sense of organizational identity. Moreover in the informal visual conversation it is much more comfortable for some people to stay in touch. Flickr can also be used as a form of information distributor, so anyone who has an access to the photos can become a potential client.
Summing up I would say that I do not see any disadvantages in this technology. As I see it Flickr is a place not just for self-display, but also for a positive emergent visual conversation in the organization as well.