14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr is finally waking up after years of slumber and is coming up with new, interesting features and tools once again. It's now debuting a very cool web app dubbed Photo Session which enables several users to browse through a set of photos, chat and even draw on top of them all in real-time and in sync.
The idea is to bring the experience of sitting around a photo album and browsing its pages to the web.
The feature is now live and you can create a new Photo Session for your albums or for albums that have enabled sharing.
"Photo Session lets you flip through photos with your friends from anywhere in the world," Flickr explained.
"Just create a Photo Session, invite your friends and browse photos together in real-time. When you move to the next photo it moves for everyone else too," it said.
"While you’re all browsing, have fun chatting and drawing on your photos using the built-in tools," it added.
Up to 10 people can join at the same time. When one of them moves to the next photo, everyone moves.
There's also a chat box, so you can share your comments, and there's a simple drawing tool so anyone can point something out or doodle something funny on top of a photo.
The tool is somewhat similar to Google+ Hangouts, in which several people can get together to video chat and do stuff together. Of course, Yahoo also has something similar, Yahoo Messenger's photos sharing feature works similarly to Flickr's Photo Session, though with local photos.
Photo Session is built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, all of the latest modern web technologies, and it's a showcase of what can be done with standard technologies these days.
And since it's just a website, it works on any browser, any browser that supports HTML5 that is. Flickr says it's guaranteed to work with Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It should probably work with Internet Explorer 9 as well.
What's more, because it's built on standard web technology, it also works on the iPad or the iPhone. It should work on Android phones and tablets as well.