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Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor.
Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years.
By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no, Marissa Mayer can't save the day on this one.
Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side.
Disclaimer: I'm a founder of OpenPhoto. We're not fighting the same fight as Flickr though so I'm an external party on this specific topic.
Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor. Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years. By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no,…
Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
I loved Flickr. It's on life support. And the prognosis is not good.
Not likely - the new app offers mobile posting, and that's about it. The Flickr site requires people to pay $25 a year to upload more than 200 photos, and regardless of what you think of premium models, there's intense competition. Flickr itself is stagnant. Years stagnant, we're talking. Features, API integration. I'm really, honestly unsure, even subscribed to their devblog and being a premium customer for 5+ years…
Anyone else who's trying to create a flikr clone should take these requirements into consideration when designing your architecture and calculating your TCO. Map reduce fleets needed for these kind of analyses after the fact is not cheap and you want to have that stuff hitting the ground so you can start working on new features right away. When flikr was made 5 years ago, these kind of features weren't really a consideration for someone with an old user-as-the-customer-model in mind. Stewart Butterfield a co-founder resigned in 2008, stating that he was an old tin man in a new age.
Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor. Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years. By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no,…
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does. Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
The only thing Flickr has going for it is their existing community who have largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than their smaller competitors.
Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet.
If you think Yahoo! can change that, well, you haven't worked there :).
500px seems to do that quite well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does. Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
But what I'm saying is that it is more likely that someone else wins that race. The only thing Flickr has going for it is their existing community who have largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than their smaller competitors. Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet. If you think Yahoo! can ch…
What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points:
-Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments.
-Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause.
-Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups.
-Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images.
-A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way.
LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.
"Either way, there is currently a gaping void on the Web for people to share higher-resolution beautiful photos." 500px seems to do that quite well. http://500px.com/
To summarize a large argument: 500px has an extremely strong groupthink, leading to a very confined set of photos that its community prefers. It is much stronger than any other photo site I've come across, including Flickr.
Its notion of beauty is very firmly in the territory of tourist-kitsch, and the single-mindedness of its community prevents it from catering to, well, any photo enthusiasts who desire something different. Heavily processed long-exposure landscapes, extreme telephotos of animals/birds, and scantily-clad/naked beautiful women - those three topics alone dominate that site.
500px's photos lean towards high production values, it does not lead to either discourse about photography as a craft or deep sharing. Which is to say, it is unlikely to replace existing photography communities, nor is it likely to take the mainstream like Flickr, or Instagram. The community shuns serious photographers outside of its narrow niche, it also shuns casual amateur shutterbugs like mom and dad's point and shoot, and it shuns "artsy" lo-fi photos like Instagram. Breaking that community out of its self-constructed (and very, very small) box I think will be the 500px team's greatest challenge.