I have a confession to make. Although I’ve been using flickr for a good long time (I’ve posted over 500 photos since July 2004), it was only several months ago that I clued into the Recent Activity feature. I had mainly been using the site as a way to stream photos to friends and family and only viewed photos from others via my RSS reader so I really didn’t explore the website that much.

One day I did happen to login to the site and found this feature which let me see who had commented on my photos, which ones were "favorited" and which were the most viewed. There were a few comments from family that I noticed (I felt horrible that I never acknowledged these!) and then someone had commented that one of my photos of a lego-encrusted car should be submitted to something called the "Pixel Art" group.

I had discovered the wonderful world of flickr groups which leads me to the topic of this post. Flickr took the wraps off a major redesign today that cleans up some of the rough edges a bit but also makes it easier for newbies to get introduced to the great communities living on the site. I’m really happy to see the Groups we’ve noticed feature because it highlights all the great groups that are out there. People that photograph interesting signs, classic cars, or strange uses of English. There are also gaming groups like the GuessWhere groups (I play the SF chapter) and the now famous squared circle group. There is really something for everyone here.

There are a ton of other features rolled out like a revamped Organizr but I’ll point to my all time favorite flickr photographer, Thomas Hawk, who gives the best run down.

Oh, and why Gamma? It comes after Beta of course.