Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
We don’t need another Web site or service to see pictures of someone’s lunch or their soy latte, or another teenager making a duck face.
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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 process is also far superior to Facebook, and the photo viewing experience is superior also when it comes to high-resolution, high-quality compression that many photographers desire. Facebook butchers uploads with awful compression artifacts.
I've been seeing a lot of amateur and professional photographers flock towards G+ - doubly so since the launch of Communities.
Personally, I like using Google+ to talk photography a hell of a lot more than I like to on Flickr. That might be telling.
Skipping over the UI, which is really, really good for photography consumption (have you seen the iPad app? it's beautiful), Google+ has one freakishly big advantage when comparing it with Facebook or Flickr that goes unmentioned:
Google Drive - because IMHO, online backup and carrying your huge collection wherever you go, on whatever device, are far more valuable for photographers than sharing.
I loved Flickr. It's on life support. And the prognosis is not good.
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.
Flickr is not dead nor is it on life support, it's just not interesting. But just because something's not interesting doesn't mean it's not exceptionally useful. Flickr's search is best in show, it's CDN is always fast and reliable and API is comprehensive.
A massive user-base and obnoxious valuation don't make something important, sometimes just being useful, even if underutilized, is good enough.
edit: it also contains many amazing collections that are easily browsable, searchable, and aren't under threat of disappearing from the internet 'cos of a passing fad.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/sets/
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.
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 :).
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.
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)
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.
And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest Pass feature, where you can share private photos with people WITHOUT forcing them to sign up for something.
It's just a matter of time before other services replicate the features Flickr has today which are valuable. Remember, they've been around for 8 or so years. It takes time to get to where they are today. But 8 years from now, it won't be Flickr we're talking about.
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 taken the place of some social networks.
I really do hope flickr becomes the next flickr. I keep putting my photos there, because I like to have them in one place. However, I do have to admit that sharing them on facebook creates much more interaction and fun.
So recently I'm switching to Google Drive for my backup needs.
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.
Flickr also serves as a great cataloging tool. It's quicker for me to find a photo by tag on flickr than to find it locally.
500px seems to do that quite well.
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.
Anyone can post to Flickr, and things like the "interesting" link actually work (based on things like comments, I gather).
If people want to use it, fine, give them the option (even though it doesn't prevent anyone determined to get a photo saved). But, for the love of everything, please don't force users to have it on. I was going to sign up (and pay) for 500px until I found out that you can't actually disable the right click blocking (see: http://support.500px.com/customer/portal/questions/475736-ri...).
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.
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.
Tumblr/Flipboard do this better already and the data can be anywhere from the internet not locked up in Flickr