Flickr: Photo Blog and Social Networking

I just stumbled across Flickr. It appears to be a hybrid photoblog and social networking tool. Very interesting. Clay Shirky blogs on Flickr as a social force. A tasty excerpt:

Flickr is nominally asynchronous, but has achieved, at least at ITP, a kind of social near-synchrony. Everyone who’s used email for longer than a month knows the mental calculation of ‘email vs phone’, as in “I need to reschedule a meeting happening N hours from now. Will they check their email, or should I call?” The more email-driven a person is, the lower N can be before email won’t work. This group is so camera-centric and Flickr-obsessed that that N for Flickr is sub 1 hour.

Read the rest. ITP must be one unique visual-dominant community. Yet, a "sub 1 hr N" for flicker is a fascinating norm. Can this generalize to other social groups?