Following a scheduled maintenance the popular photography site Flickr.com went down and stayed down for the better part of the weekend.

It all started when George Oates posted this entry to Flickr’s dev blog on Saturday.

2:30pm PST: We started on a database upgrade and a few alters to the database structure last night. Given our scale, work like this takes a long time, and makes a definite impact on site performance.

You may have noticed today that the site is having lots of hiccups and that behavior is generally pretty erratic. So, we’ve decided to take the site offline help things settle down. We’re anticipating a couple of hours is all we need at this point, so, we’re hoping to be back online around 4:30 PST.

The downtime expectations were a bit off and flickr was down all night and some hours on Sunday which I truly understand. Time estimates are usually made in a conservative way, always allocating some spare time to tackle some last minute problem. Apparently this last minute problem was serious.

But the main thing that struck me as quite hilarious was the reactions to the downtime either on twitter or blogs. People literally panicked. All those photos gone without publishing. All those groups without a constant stream of photos to their pools. Quite sad.

All this commotion got me thinking what would happen if Facebook went down for a couple of days. Or even the worse if Gmail went down.

In this day and age how can we survive without these little tools that enable us to communicate?
What would you do if Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook were down for two days? Leave a comment, I want to hear about your doomsday scenarios.

I must confess I had very low expectations when I read this blog post shared by Robert Scoble about a new web app called Photophlow.

According to their website “photophlow is an easy and fun way to talk about and share flickr photos in real time.
Think of it as the ultimate flickr communicator: invite your friends, search photos together, chat and comment all at once.” which immediately got me thinking about some meebo + flickr mashup.

After signing up to the beta, I got my invitation fairly quickly. The site is brilliantly designed in a simple and intuitive way.

It’s indeed a chat app, but it’s interwined with flickr in many ways. Letting the user share not only his pictures with others, but search for topics being discussed to illustrate a point or simply add something new to talk about.

Flickr Group moderators will go ape with Photophlow. By casually grouping together in real time a bunch of people that share the same common artistic and photo interests.

Several features of Photophlow reveal great attention to detail. Chat users are used to demonstrate actions by using commands like /clap /smiles. These commands are not only readily available but can be linked to any photo on flickr. So if you want your smile to show a picture of a grinning dog or a sad clown, it’s just up to you.

While I was testing out Photophlow I got to talk a bit to Neil Berkman one of the developers behind this project. He took the time to give me the full guided tour and answer some questions. Thanks Neil.

I’m not internet guru, or startup analyst but Photophlow will hit Flickr like a storm.