Geodog

Meeting my mother on Flickr

After a long period of inactivity, I recently posted a number of pictures to my photo album and my account on Flickr. I was very surprised to get a comment on a fairly commonplace photo of a vase with flowers on my dining room table, a photo that I posted primarily to debug problems I was having with Flickr's support of IPTC. "What lovely flowers in your dining room...and my favorite placemats" said the comment, by Ann20190. Who was Ann20190, I wondered? The person seemed to know a lot about my house, but I don't currently have any Anns in my life in Berkeley. I had a very good friend named Ann who used to live in Colorado, but she moved to the East Coast and I lost touch with her. 17 years ago I had a girlfriend named Ann, but I haven't heard from her in years. I looked at Ann20190's profile, but there wasn't anything useful there -- I was listed as her only contact. Finally, it dawned on me -- it was my mother, commenting on my photos. Now this may primarily an indicator of how thick I can be, but I think there is more to the story.

Now my mother is no slouch at technology -- she created a web page for her workplace before I built TheBishop.Net, she has been known to IM with a writer from Wired, and she has been using Firefox since before 1.0. But neither is she a TechCrunch Web 2.0 early adopter, trying every new service as soon as it is announced. As far as I know, I've never told her about Flickr, although she may have read the blog post about Flickr that got me quoted in Salon. But there she was, commenting on my photos. As far as I know, she found the service on her own -- she certainly figured out how to open an account and leave comments without any help from me.

I'd say Flickr has crossed the early adopter chasm and graduated to the real world, and I guess I need to buy my mother a digital camera for her birthday, so she can start posting photos.