Jason Kottke, in a post rounding up his favorite weblogs of the year, puts his Flickr friends page at #1:

Flickr is the most fun on the web right now. Period. It’s the closest thing I’ve experienced online to hanging out with your friends at the coffeeshop.

The combination of prevalent cameraphones, RSS, and social networking ideas takes Flickr out of the realm of the ofotos and creates something new, something more like a cross between LiveJournal and webcams. Maybe it’s my disposition, but I find myself much more likely to take a photo that tells a story about my life than to write something on my blog. (Even if a cellcam photo isn’t worth quite a thousand words, it’s often more than I’m motivated to write on my own.) And there’s definitely something absurd and addictive about letting others see scenes from your life in near-real-time.

It’s worth comparing it to a site with similar ideals, Upcoming.org. Upcoming is a 100% user-contributed site that lists events in any area that cares to create a city listing—pretty clever. It’s got some of the same social software elements: I can identify friends and get RSS listings of the events they’re interested in. So why is my Upcoming friends feed so much more of a wasteland than my Flickr one? I think it comes down to posting frequency. Unfortunately, in many places there isn’t all that much going on—and even when there is, many of us can’t spare the time or expense to go to shows every week. (It’s no surprise that the two most active metro areas on Upcoming are geek-hipster meccas New York and San Fran.) Simply put, there isn’t enough fodder in Upcoming’s scope for my friends and I to communicate about, and I can forget that the site exists for months at a time. If Upcoming wants to become more useful and prominent, they should allow for friends-only listings of “events” like private parties and happy hour meetups, which would move their service more into the realm of Evite. It would give them more traffic while giving users an opt-in alternative to Evite’s obnoxious HTML spam-mails.

With private events, Upcoming would be a more interesting window into your friends’ futures, but what about their pasts? A more radical change for Upcoming would be to expand their commenting system to allow users to post stories and photos about the events afterwards (or even, thanks to cellcams, during the event). In this way, an event listing in Upcoming would turn into a historical record, and serve as the common reference point for all of the other media and metadata about that event. As a recent Salon story pointed out, people are already using Flickr’s tagging and grouping systems to do this for things like weddings, art shows, and conferences. Why not give them a way do this less ambiguously and with better metadata?