Flickr Burning As Yahoo Fiddles: Head Of Service Walks Away | Hacker News Reader

Flickr Burning As Yahoo Fiddles: Head Of Service Walks Away

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40 pointsdave161930 comments

Flickr seems to have a good social aspect but other than that I detest their web interface and don't understand how or why people use it. It seems designed to make it hard to casually browse photos, inserting a painful full page reload in between every image I click. PicasaWeb is miles easier to use. Ironically, I don't really like the Picasa rich client so I use a different tool and configure it to upload to PicasaWeb.

Which tool do you use? I've been considering switching to Picasa recently. [1]

[1] I've held off because my GAFYD account seems to be in the "transition limbo" that occurs when you have accounts on services like Analytics. I'm doing my best to hold off on any new Google services until this all gets resolved.

I recommend deviantart (unless you're going to upload personal photos)

I don't see what's the big deal here? This is The Valley! People move around. So many people have left Google, and yet we don't see a "Google fiddles while . . . " headline from TechCrunch.

The big deal is that many people see Yahoo as a company that time has passed by. There was a time when its properties were the tops. Everyone used Yahoo Mail or AOL, Flickr was the tops if you wanted to share photos, Yahoo.com was the home page of so many more and they used Yahoo search. Today, a lot of our community looks at Yahoo and sees a search engine they wouldn't want to use, a bloated homepage more about flash than utility, a Yahoo Mail that doesn't hold a candle to Gmail, etc. EXCEPT: Flickr. Flickr's still pretty good. Facebook has overtaken Flickr, but Flickr still offers more high-res options, decent topical search, a clean interface that's been spared a lot of the nonsense Yahoo is pushing, etc. But it hasn't progressed lately.

If Yahoo is to make a comeback, they need the types that have been in charge of Flickr (or so the community's reasoning goes). Flickr is the one thing we like that Yahoo's doing (well, maybe add Delicious in there too). And yet Yahoo is letting those properties languish and the talent that works on those properties leave. Sure, Google loses talent, but generally speaking I don't find certain Google properties to have an interface that is so markedly terrible compared to other Google properties. Our community looks at Google's ventures and while they might not understand social, we see that there's a decent consistency of engineering. However, we do look at Yahoo's different properties and many feel like they came from a different company - partly because Yahoo bought their way into Delicious, Flickr, and Upcoming (yea, I added another that I've almost never used).

Imagine that Google had bought YouTube and YouTube's interface and engineering was just so markedly better (to you) than the rest of Google's properties. Then the employees who created this, in your view, superior product started leaving constantly. You'd think: c'mon Google, you bought yourself into the good stuff and we want to those engineers bring that good stuff to the rest of your line, not leave with their products languishing!

People move around, but I think many of us feel that Yahoo has markedly varying quality depending on the division of the company. It might not have any actual significance and engineers might not be leaving those divisions more often than other divisions, but it does have an emotional significance for our community. Many thought that Flickr heralded a new Yahoo. It makes it feel like Yahoo doesn't get where it's gone wrong (in our ultra-hip, we know what's best not some CEO the investors have hired, why isn't the world listening to me as I type away at my keyboard on the internets way).

/Apologies for speaking for everyone; it's more just a theory.

FYI yahoo mail is still huge.

Anyone wanting to build the next Flickr, let us know. We're looking to provide the tools to tie such a product to existing social graphs, and to handle migrating photos, lists and feedback to the next big social photo service.

E-mail me (listed in my profile) if you're wanting to talk about building a social photo app on the Windsoc API.

Are they not bult already?

The next free/social Flickr is Facebook

The next pro Flickr is SmugMug

I think in your listing you've alluded to two possibilities right there: 1) an app that combines free/social and pro, and 2) an app that allows for distributed photos rather than the centralized model. It looks to me like there's still room for more players.

In my experience working with lots (thousands) or pro photographers, they don't want to use the same services as hobbyists. Just my $0.02

I forget the last time I uploaded a photo to Flickr. Somehow, without any conscious decision, it's just stopped being part of my flow. Perhaps it's that not many of my friends and family see what I post (I live overseas from most of my family and friends), perhaps it's the seemingly constant begging for me to "come back" to a pro membership (nothing is a turn off as much as desperation), maybe it's just that Facebook is winning and someone else has to lose.

And just to add, I really like Flickr. The interface for organising photos is streets ahead of Facebook. And as an amateur photographer, I enjoy looking at others' work and seeing the exif data to see what camera and settings were used. Buy somehow it's not enough to make me want to stay.

"somehow" = social. That's how Facebook won with a vastly, vastly inferior product otherwise.

Anyone used SmugMug (http://www.smugmug.com/) - is it any good?

I have a friend who's been using SmugMug for a while. He likes it better than Flickr and seems to have had a very positive experience with the service overall. I was considering using it myself.

SmugMug lacks the social angle is that is important to some photographers (including myself). Self-promotion via Flickr is incredibly easy - their metrics on each of your uploads is incredibly useful also (for gauging general public interest in your work).

Flickr is less about your personal gallery - it's more about a universe of images, made easily discoverable, and easily shareable and discussable. SmugMug is definitely more of a "your hosted gallery" service, which is useful as a portfolio for photographers (and a sales point, via their tightly integrated print sales), but is really not comparable to Flickr as a social and promotional tool. I really enjoy exploring and looking at the work of superior photographers and learning from that - losing Flickr would be a huge blow to the photography community. SmugMug is not nearly so discoverable.

SmugMug's social aspects are largely external. Due to its very high adoption on sites like AdvRider, and its rudimentary community support (e.g. http://www.smugmug.com/community/ADVrider/popular/all), it seems to be more than a typical gallery site.

IMO Flickr will lose because they focused too much on the social angle. Meanwhile, it's a mediocre photo-management site, with lousy uploader apps, and people are just posting directly to Facebook.

"Lose" is relative I suppose - Flickr has a hard lock on much of the photographic community. FB Photos is still limited to vacation photos, wild nights out, etc. There's not a great deal of hard photography going on there - a photographer's social graph is inevitably a lot of non-photogs, and Flickr's ability to discover and participate across vast social graphs is powerful for photographers. FB's limitation of requiring social graph adjacency for most levels of participation is a liability for this use case.

So sure, SmugMug and FB are destroying Flickr as a tool for Joe Average's image uploads, but as a photographic community I honestly don't think it's doing so badly. From a monetization standpoint it's not a bad bet - you would have a hard time selling a Flickr Pro account to the average FB user. But $20/yr. as a ticket price for a ludicrous number of amateur to professional photographers? No brainer.

You're absolutely right about the hardcore photographer crowd. But as Facebook's image support improves, and Flickr remains static, I think you'll even see that shift.

Even if Facebook's own image support doesn't improve to the level of Flickr Pro, don't you suppose that a service like SmugMug, plus social integration via Facebook (or similar), would match or beat Flickr for both quality of hosting and social connectivity?

By the way, I'm a Flickr Pro member. I got tired of managing Gallery 2, but I'm pretty disappointed by the lousy uploader tool, the restrictive 'photo stream' concept, etc.

They're profitable and have no interest in selling. So - they better be good :) http://www.smugmug.com/about/

I was an enthusiastic Flickr user starting about 6 years ago or so. It had an excellent feature set and was even fairly reasonably priced.

However, Flickr has barely changed (at best only minor cosmetic changes) in that time frame while the entire rest of the web has transformed around them. Absolutely free image sharing on the web is now ubiquitous (imgur, twitpic, etc.) The smartphone market has exploded, the state of modern web development has advanced greatly, and social platforms (twitter, facebook, etc.) have utterly transformed the landscape. Meanwhile, hosting and bandwidth has gotten much cheaper though flickr's pricing model remains the same.

I think Flickr's business model is now irrevocably broken, they are surviving off of fumes at this point.

I have wanted a Flickr competitor with start-up culture and mentality for a while. I feel reticent about uploading my private photos to Flickr, because Flickr don't have any second layers of authentication.

I'm convinced that there's a great start-up opportunity here.

Me too. http://blog.getgush.com/post/3858261541/were-hiring-a-few-se...

Best of luck.

It'd be fantastic if you supported YubiKeys: http://www.yubico.com/for-developers.

Looks more like something for bank accounts etc? Strong auth?

Banks? They have a pretty simple API, as I understand, and it's incredibly easy and convenient to use. (You can even use it on iOS devices, if you use the USB adapter.)

I have wanted a Flickr competitor with start-up culture and mentality for a while

Kind of like Flickr was back when they were a startup?

I want a competitor who can exist and provide hassle-free service for at least a decade, and my standards are always rising. I can't spend all my time jumping ship from one "start out, sell out, burn out" company to the next.

Yes, there is an opportunity: to provide a service that is sustainable.

It's funny: I managed to put off uploading my photos to Flickr for so long that I out-delayed Flickr itself. Procrastination for the win, I guess.

Where will my photos end up? Dropbox, perhaps. Dropbox really is a great startup: My local data is backed up online and vice versa. If they vanished tomorrow I'd lose nothing. Would barely even have to think.

Maybe someone should value-add some more Flickr features to Dropbox.

I don't know about the "they" - I don't know if anything happened after the creator(s) sold it. As I recall, the original creator resigned quite vociferously.

Maybe some services should just be replaced every five years.

Anyone tried snapixel? http://www.snapixel.com/

Looks like it could be a decent Flickr alternative.

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