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Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

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Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#21

Post by bigiain »

jmathai wrote: post #2

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,…

"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered."

It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll start storing photos elsewhere, but I'll probably choose to not only export all my Flickr photos and re upload them to the new place, but also choose to keep paying Flickr for long enough that I don't care too much about all the forum and blog posts pout there embedding Flickr urls - that's quite likely to represent another 5 years of Flickr subscription, even if they don't offer me anything except continuing service of the photos/videos on their current URLs. (My Flickr stats show long-tail trickles of image views from forums I've not been on in 3 or 4 years, at least some of which I'd be sad if the people looking for that sort of specific information (in my case, a lot of repair and service information for late 1990's Ducati Monsters) ended up with a bunch of broken image links)

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#22

Post by wyclif »

potatolicious wrote: post #11

Speaking from the perspective of the photography-enthusiast category, I've been coming to the conclusion that Google+ may become the next Flickr. It has first-class communications features that Flickr has always sorely needed. Commenting isn't a tiny box at the bottom with awful pagination, you can upvote posts as well as comments, and it has group sharing capabilities well beyond "add to pool". The photo upload proc…

What do you think are the best photography Communities now on G+?

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#23

Post by n0nick »

joonix wrote: post #16

>Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows people to skim through high-resolution images on the service? How does this Flickr app not already exist? I'm pretty sure a couple of 20yr old coders could make an app like this in a day or two if they had access to Flickr's data. The hard part isn't displaying images on a tablet, its having the high quality images in the first place.

Well, go ahead then :) The APIs are out there...

IMO the challenge here is defining the right UX and brand. Not to say that it shouldn't be done, I'd much rather Flickr achieving this than Instagram (= Facebook) or any other current player in the market.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#24

Post by aes256 »

bad_user wrote: post #19
lancefisher wrote: post #15

"People loved — I mean loved! – Flickr" This is true for me. Flickr was the first web service I paid for, and I still do. It really was a generational leap at the time. Photos were meant to be shared, and they nailed it. Tagging and tag clouds, folksonomy, embeddable badges - these were all fresh back then and they worked well. If only they would have added the ability to tag friends early on, I think it could have t…

I used to backup my photos on Flickr, but Flickr is awful for backups. You can't upload lengthy videos, you can't backup your raw files, retrieving your whole collection back from Flickr is extremely painful, etc... So recently I'm switching to Google Drive for my backup needs.

I know a lot of people who also used flickr primarily as a backup solution. Sharing their photos with strangers on the Internet was always a secondary motivation.

This may, at least in part, explain flickr's gradual decline. In the age of cheap 3TB hard drives, 64GB SD cards, and cloud backup solutions, flickr seems a little old-hat.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#26

Post by justincormack »

bigiain wrote: post #21
jmathai wrote: post #2

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,…

"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered." It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll st…

My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#27

Post by dageshi »

troymc wrote: post #8

I often want a photo to illustrate a blog post, but I want one that I can use legally, e.g. public domain or under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only (CC-BY) license. Flickr provides an easy way to search for CC-BY photos in their collections; I find it incredibly useful: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/

Likewise, in my experience searching for CC photo's on flickr is significantly better than searching for the same using google image search. Not so often you find google being outdone by anyone...

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#29

Post by 89a »

joonix wrote: post #16

>Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows people to skim through high-resolution images on the service? How does this Flickr app not already exist? I'm pretty sure a couple of 20yr old coders could make an app like this in a day or two if they had access to Flickr's data. The hard part isn't displaying images on a tablet, its having the high quality images in the first place.

Because no one would care?

Tumblr/Flipboard do this better already and the data can be anywhere from the internet not locked up in Flickr

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#30

Post by neilk »

jmathai wrote: post #2

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,…

> Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side.

There's probably room for a lot of different kinds of photo sharing apps. Even ones that the tech press or hackers don't care about. Shutterfly pulls in hundreds of millions dollars a year, mostly from paper products related to uploaded photos. Like photos for your kids' softball team.

Flickr can't be the next Flickr, because when Flickr was Flickr it was the only app of its kind. People really were doing a lot of different activities on the site; photos were the media object to organize it around. Back in 2005, it was Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., all in one. Whatever Flickr is going forward, it will probably be more narrow and more deep. I'm not sure they can win as an all-things-to-all-people photos site.

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