I scored an invitation to the beta of PhotoPhlow.com via a badge at Joi Ito’s blog and discovered an amazing story linking back through the history - yes, history - of Web 2.0 photo-sharing phenomenon Flickr.

If, like me, you spend *a bit too much* time with Flickr you’re going to love PhotoPhlow. Because it works with Flickr, the new service contains all the Flickry goodness you already adore - as in two billion photos by people-like-you (we passed the two billionth photo uploaded last week), snazzy tools, community stuff and - who could forget - the quintessential open API. But PhotoPhlow actually out-Flickr’s Flickr by souping the conversation up with real-time photo super-sharing and chat. There are interesting ways to express yourself in a chat room when everyone’s got access to 2 billion fairly good photos at the flick of a mouse. To give you a poor example, this morning I was talking about East London with the site’s creators based in Seattle and we were able to find, simultaneously display and chat about photos of East London from Flickr’s database. We chatted with a handful of other people. They all popped in and out. In pictures, we discussed how similar Shoreditch in London is to SOMA in San Francisco (”never more than a metre from a web designer”) - right down to junkie knife fights in alleyways. And as we typed ‘junkie‘ and ‘knife fight‘, we were presented with in-line links to images of both. Don’t worry - it turns out that ‘Kentucky’ Knife Fight are a Rockabilly/Surf-Rock band.

Check out a screencast demo here if you’d like to see what it’s like without having to request an invitation.

Compared to a standard IM chat experience, PhotoPhlow feels incredibly liberating. And because the service currently only appeals to alpha Flickrgeeks (and is invitation only), it’s reasonably intelligent and interesting (excluding, of course, myself). If, as I read somewhere recently, the future of marketing is about facilitating conversations through shared media, a lot of it’s going to happen with real-time browser-based media sharing like this. Imagine what happens with a video version of this, or a service that allows you to mix music, images, drawing (the graffiti tool is *still* my favourite bit of Facebook) and video. If it appeals to the relatively few so-called Creators and Uploaders who drive today’s emerging Social Web, what will this experience be like when tomorrow’s vast and scary army of brand editors kids they call the Net Generation arrive at the gates of our sanctuaries.

But I digress. The story of Photophlow’s evolution is of great interest to the casual historian of photo-sharing. It’s a story that takes you back to the days when chat and photo-sharing were both rawly combined twin concepts in a service called Game Neverending (’GNE‘ to the Flickreenos). GNE was a flashy, web-based massively multiplayer online game with a bit of photo-sharing on the side. Flickr ultimately proved a more feasible project and Game Neverending was shelved. Because of this heritage, early versions of Flickr focused on a multi-user chat room called FlickrLive that provided real-time photo exchange capabilities.

Screenshot of Game Neverending thanks to Thurgood Marshall

At this stage, Flickr was much more about collecting images from all over the Web than photographs taken by users. Over time, the user-created upload and share service evolved as the dominant feature and the chat room got buried. It was eventually dropped as Flickr’s back end systems evolved away from the Game Neverending’s codebase.

PhotoPhlow brings it full circle by extending the messaging around photo-sharing into the realm of live chat. I asked CEO and Chief Code Monkey Neil Berkman last week about how the service came together. He explained the re-connection with Flickr, and how he met his designer Striatic:

“About 18 months ago I started working on the underlying technology that enables real-time collaboration and sharing. As I was thinking about how to apply this, it seemed that photos would be ideal for a couple of reasons. Photography is one of the most democratic forms of media, with a high proportion of very accomplished amateurs.

Finding Striatic was a tremendous stroke of luck. When I first thought of building photophlow I did a search to figure out whether anyone had built an application like the one I had in mind and found an interview with Eric Costello of Flickr in which he mentioned a Flash-based chat/photo-sharing client called Flickr Live. I then googled “Flickr Live” and the first search result was a mock-up that Striatic had posted of his concept for a new version:

I contacted him to ask whether he’d be interested in making this a reality. Soon after we started working together I realized that in addition to being an insightful information architect as well as the prototypical user of the service (having been an avid user of Flickr Live, a serious photographer and very active Flickr user) he’s also a very talented designer and HTML/CSS coder. It took us longer than we had hoped to get to a public beta, about a year, but we’re really pleased with the reaction we’ve had so far. Even the folks from Flickr have given their approval - in fact Eric Costello now has a PhotoPhlow badge on his Flickr profile!”

The service has been in closed beta for a couple of weeks whilst they sort out some user experience glitches and scale up the back-end. Get over there. Get a beta pass and tell them what you think. In images.

Tags: chat, flickr, media sharing, photophlow, web