Salon published a really good article about the many uses of Flickr, the on-line photo sharing site that I've been using for the past 10 days. The article points out some interesting statistics:

• 176,000 members,
• 2.2 million photos, growing at a rate of 30,000 per day,
• 82 percent of those photos are available to anyone, so the photo owners chose not to keep them private to friends and family.

This is interesting because I made most of the first photos I uploaded private because they were taken on Christmas Eve and Christmas when my wife and I were exchanging gifts with friends and family. I like keeping photos of family events mostly private, while I make public my photo blog / moblog-type photos available as soon as I can in my Flickr photostream. I also separate the photos that are specific to Operation Gadget into Operation Gadget's own photo gallery. This is the best of all worlds for me.

Salon makes you buy a subscription or sit through a little commercial before being able to view the complete article. It's worth reading if you are interested in the social aspects of Flickr, like I am.

Oliver Travers pointed to the Salon article from his weblog. His article also contains some a couple of links to the FlickrBlog (written by the folks that run Flickr) that discuss the complexities of running a rapidly growing site and upgrading on-the-fly.