Oh god no, not another one: Another band with a wagon in which to hold the whole sky, Vancouver's all-star Ludicorp has opened the login-screens on Flickr ...

what if we put live chat together with social networks and enabled people to share media with one another in real time?

The paint isn't quite dry and of course it is getting rave a-lister reviews --- their innofateful share-hook is that real-timeyness ... which seems to mean signing up for yet another disconnected IM. Hard to say other than the caution, "Flickr is built on Ludicorp's platform for messaging and event distribution" and Caterina's comment "today George and I were trying to greet every single person that came in ..."

The Attack of the Social Wal-Marts

As for what's in it for you and me, the pickings in this new yet another one-stop all-you-can-chat agoraphic's nightmare, Caterina's home spot shares some accollades, usual demographicals, and lists some 22 'public groups' links, a few with missing-e flikr branding, many with old familiar geekdom names like MetaFilter and kuro5hin, but each is a link to the subscriber form before anything gets disclosed so who knows what's in there. Meta-fora for fans of famous forums? Who knows.

Colour me dense, but man, I just don't get it. I understand conversations and communications, but why go there to do it? If I want to talk kuro5hin, why not go to kuro5hin? If I want to understand Caterina, I found her blog was as much as I needed to know, with the sidebar of blogrolls for her network, lots of space for her photos, blogs scale really well, stay personal, cheap and easy to do, and if we'd ever need to pass some holiday snaps back and forth, well email works pretty good for my ma an' me.

It's got to be me; it's top of the blogdex already, but y'know, maybe it's my age or my marital status or my basic unsocialiteness ...

"I sent the club a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

I wonder if they have a Groucho Group ...