ReadWriteWeb

This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.

Out with the old, in with the new. One of the “old” ways of thinking that finally kicked the bucket in 2011? That users could get a free ride on Web services with no catch. As Robert Heinlein famously said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). This realization isn’t new for some, but the realization should finally be kicking in for mainstream users as well.

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr may have been eclipsed by Facebook as the world's most popular photo sharing site, but there are some things Facebook is probably never going to be able to pull off. For one thing, the creation of a giant public repository of rights-liberal photos available for re-use. Flickr announced today that it has hit 200 million Creative Commons licensed photos, making it the world's largest CC photo collection. Creative Commons is a series of easy-to-use licenses that communicate the conditions that your creative work may be re-used under without asking you explicit permission. (E.g. "with attribution," "for non-commercial use," "no derivatives.")

What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.

Flickr just announced its first native Android app for shooting and sharing photos. It offers quick filters, topic and location tagging, access to comments and groups, and full-screen browsing and slideshows. It has a full list of sharing options as well as privacy controls.

There's also a new feature for all Flickr users called Photo Session, which lets members browse photo slideshows in sync together over the Web. Users can chat and doodle on photos during a Photo Session. It supports all major desktop browsers, iPhone and iPad.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield has launched Glitch, a massively multi-player online game that he created with his company TinySpeck.

The game is an imaginative journey through the minds of 11 giants that is somewhat fun to play, but will probably require a little explanation. We spoke with Butterfield about Glitch.

In the world of online community management, Heather Champ's work in the early days of Flickr has been the inspiration for countless practitioners who followed and who aim to optimize the social in social media around the web. Champ left Flickr 18 months ago to start her own consulting practice but today announced on Twitter that she and her old boss, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, have been reunited.

Heather Champ says that today was her first day working at 2BKCO, the stealth mobile social software startup that Fake announced in June that she was working on.

Flickr will announce a new feature this morning called Geofences, forward- and backward-looking place-specific privacy settings for the location data of the geotagged photos you upload. The feature is live right now and is really well implemented - this is something that every social network ought to enable.

Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!

What would you do if Flickr shut down some day? Do you think that photo services like Instagram might be just the beginning of what could be possible in terms of social photo innovation? Is Facebook Photos just a place the share and forget, leaving a big demand remaining for archival storage of all the photos we're taking these days?

Such are the questions being tackled by a new startup called OpenPhoto.me, an open source project being built by long-time photo sharing guy Jaisen Mathai. OpenPhoto.me is a photo sharing app and it's a platform for other apps: it pushes all your photos, tags and comments into cloud storage that you own, on Amazon S3, Rackspace or Dropbox. Then you can grant any photo app access to those photos as you see fit.

NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.

In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.

While Yahoo has said that it is "absolutely committed" to social picture sharing site Flickr, the same might not be said for the folks at the top of the company. Today, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg announced that he would be "stepping away from Flickr," the third such departure since Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake left in 2008.

Can Flickr hang on in the photo sharing realm or will other niche social photo sharing services and Facebook - the biggest photo sharing site on the Internet - take its place?