Flickrvision - New photos pop up on a map, wherever they are. This would be fun if one was seeking random inspiration, but that's the only practical application I can think of for it. I watched it for several minutes and saw some interesting pictures, and also some incredibly boring ones. On several occasions, a popup popped up blank, with only a note saying the photo was "unavailable." I can only guess that these may be pictures the Flickr member opted not to share publicly, or perhaps deleted immediately after uploading. Too bad there isn't a mechanism for excluding them from the popups. Sometimes the pictures came quickly, sometimes not. When they came slowly, the whole experience was boring. I probably won't visit this site again. I have plenty of other sources for random inspiration.
Flickr Color Pickr - Pick a color from a mosaic, and it shows an array of photos containing predominantly that color. Now this one I imagine a real use for, especially if someone is building a photo mosaic and wants each small photo to behave like a pixel within a larger picture. I know there are programs that create such mosaics automatically, but if you wanted to create an original work of art not existing as a source picture, this could be useful. Also, if you wanted a picture to match a given background, decor, or mood, this might be a good way to search. You even have limited control over the types of pictures the come up, if you want only pictures of doors, graffiti, or urban decay. This could be a big bucket of fun for artists and creative designers. And it has much better potential for sparking random inspiration than Flickrvision, because you control the pace.
Montagr - And this site does automatically what I described above: rendering a larger image out of a mosaic of smaller images. However, the resolution isn't great, and the montages aren't very identifiable. For the few I looked at, I could not identify what the montage was trying to depict. They provide the source picture the program is trying to render, and each time I thought, "Okay, I can kind of see it, but not really . . . no, no. That really looks absolutely nothing whatsoever like it." It ended up looking more like abstract art. Also, the montages take a very long time to load, even with broadband.
Spell with Flickr - This is really fun, and potentially very useful for graphic design. However, the site is frankly ugly, and once you've spelled a word with pictures of letters, it's not terribly obvious how to return to the main page to enter another word. (It's a very tiny link labeled "Entry form" in the middle of the page.) Clunky site design aside, this app is just plain cool. If you enter the same word twice (or if you keep refreshing the results page), you get different images spelling it out, so you could keep retrying until you get one that fits your aesthetic.
There were scads of third party apps listed in the Great Flickr Tools Collection. Just reading the list would have taken me all night, to say nothing of trying any of them. I'm sure there's an app for just about anything you could possibly want to do, but I'm not sure how you'd find an app in that incredibly long, unordered list. They need to break their tools down into categories or something. (They need a cataloger!) I did try a couple of them, but neither worked with my (horribly outdated) browser.
Flickrbits has the same problem. A big list of apps without any discernible order. If you're just browsing for something to play with, that's fine. Finding something specific is more difficult.
From that list, I picked Bubblr, which is a neat concept (allowing you to add dialogue/thought balloons to images and create your own comic strips), but I found it clunky in the execution. It's not very forgiving about letting you correct errors or edit the order of your images once selected. I got frustrated before I even had a complete comic.
I was just about ready to quit looking at Flickr apps when I noticed The Internet Inferno: Dante's hell as seen by Flickr. You descend into Hell (scroll down the page). Each circle of torment is populated by images that happened to be tagged with the name of the sin associated with the layer of hell. Some of the images are disturbing, but a lot of them are just weird. Many make little sense. Sometimes It's a mystery why a particular photo was tagged so that it ended up where it did. I mean, I wasn't surprised to see a sloth under Sloth--in fact I would have been disappointed if I hadn't--however, I am still puzzling as to why a goose appeared under Envy, or a bunch of lizards under Avarice. The page took a long time to load, but it was bizarrely fascinating. It's not particularly interactive, so it may be best to view this page as a creative work in and of itself, a work of art that changes every time you visit.
Anyway, of the six Flickr apps I looked at tonight, the only ones I am likely to revisit are Flickr Color Pickr and Spell with Flickr. But who knows what I'll discover in the future.
Which of these tools and toys might be of use in a library setting? Any of them. You never know what kind of question someone might have. It's good to have a passing familiarity with many many strange things as possible, because what seems esoteric to me might be the absolute perfect thing for someone else.
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