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No video in my Flickr, please

Fred Oliveira on August 4, 2007 Comments (23)

Mike posted yesterday on Techcrunch that Yahoo was planning on finally adding video to Flickr. I have to go against Mike on this one and call this a bad move: not because I hate video (I love it), but because it’ll ruin the beauty of Flickr: simplicity and efficiency.

Do one thing right

Flickr is the number one service for photo sharing on the web, and does it exceptionally well. It is simple to navigate, very clutter free, very photo-centric. People love that – I love that. Heck, Flickr may very well be my #1 favorite service out there.

Now, look at Youtube – despite the fact that I believe their layout has a few flaws -, they excel at video sharing. It’s what they’re good at, and numbers (for both memberships and uploaded videos) seem to agree. No need to go anywhere else for video.

These are two examples of doing one thing right – how well do you think Yahoo would do by adding video to Flickr? Not too well, it’s definitely not the Flickr mindset. Consider the reverse scenario: Youtube adding photos. Preposterous idea, I hear you say – exactly. Just like Flickr dwelling into the world of online video – a crazy idea, and apparently quite out of touch with the majority of the Flickr audience.

Flickr + Video

A few alternative routes

Now obviously Yahoo doesn’t want to miss the video bandwagon – makes total sense to them from a business perspective. But you shouldn’t mess with a product that clearly does well in a different market just for the me-too feeling – the implications of messing with something as big as Flickr are huge. And Yahoo does have alternatives:

Jumpcut, hello? Jumpcut is Yahoo’s video solution. And if you’ve never heard of it before (which wouldn’t surprise me at all), that’s only because Y! has been doing a really poor job at promoting and enhancing that service. It’s a youtube competitor, but it lacks positioning and attitude. It’s Yahoo!, they definitely can spruce it up a bit.

Integrate, don’t build: If Y! does want to have videos in the Flickr interface, why not integrate Jumpcut instead of hacking video into Flickr itself? Am I the only one for which this approach makes more sense? They’re both Y! properties, and by integrating, each would maintain its own identity. People who wanted videos with their Flickr profile would pull those in from Jumpcut, and that’s it.

Concluding thoughts

I must confess I’m a little skeptical about these changes to Flickr. It worries me that they’ll mess up a service that so many people use effectively in their daily lives just to go with the flow. Do you have any thoughts and opinions? Please leave them in the comments – thanks, and have a great weekend!

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Comments on this post

Hashim Warren

“Flickr is the number one service for photo sharing on the web…”

actually, Photobucket is. And Photobucket hosts images and videos.

i think it would make sense if Jumpcut edits, Yahoo Videos searches, and Flickr hosts…online videos

Justin Ruckman

Maybe integrating Jumpcut technology is part of the Flickr video strategy?

Dominic

If Flickr makes their video community more like Vimeo, and not YouTube, I could see this working well.

Sunny

If by some mystical magic Flickr manages to persuade people only to upload family videos, the kind you make with your camera, then it’ll work. And become even better.

Will

As a photographer and avid flickr user/browser, where it has become a standard for sharing images of the digital…I def don’t want to see video hacked into it.

The newspaper industry has been in a weird video is better than photo funk when it comes to the web, and I hate seeing video become a replacement medium where I work. But set that aside, video in flickr probably wouldn’t catch on, nor do I wish to even see it.

I wasn’t happy when Y! bought flickr mostly because I figured they would chop it up down the road. Let’s hope they keep their head on straight and improve their own video solution, which I hadn’t even heard of until this post.

Stut.net » links for 2007-08-04

[...] No video in my Flickr, please Yahoo is planning to add video to Flickr! I have to agree this is a bad move. Flickr does photos very well, and I think it will dilute that excellence if they go ahead with these plans. (tags: video flickr) [...]

Colin

I already get annoyed when I find screenshots in there while browsing through photos so video would be really taking it one step too far for me.

Benjamin David

I follow you on that one Fred, I fear that it messes up everything in Flickr. I’m using Vimeo instead of Youtube because I find it more user friendly and the community is great. I would just say that there’s bridge missing between these two services but an auto thumbnail picture of my video on Flickr would be just enough.

Coleman Hines

I don’t understand wy the fear of change becuase of an *additional” feature. The thing about flickr is that you can choose which features/interests you are interested in and ignore the rest. Not fussed about geo-tagging – well don’t use it. Hate graphic art/cgi stuff – filter them out. A good example is the porn underground on flickr – its massive, but your average Mum & Dad user never see it because of the filtering system and also because they don’t go looking for it.

In the same way, i would bet a large proportion of flickr users would like to upload photo and video of their latest holiday/party, so its a no brainer for flickr to add it. For those not interested in video, I would also bet that flickr comes up with a way to avoid it if you’re not interested in it.

Matt Grommes

I don’t think Flickr+video is going to be a Youtube competitor at all. When I take videos of my kids, I want to be able to share them with my family (who already know how to see my Flickr pictures), not put them on Youtube. Just the fact of not having to make my family sign up for another site, bookmark it, remember it, etc., makes me long for just putting my videos on Flickr and being done with it.

Flickr’s interface people know what they’re doing and I can’t see why the video pages won’t look and feel just like the picture pages, with the addition of Play buttons.

bex

I agree with Matt…

I love Flickr guest passes, not to mention the separation of public/private/friends/family. Their tagging support could use a little help, but its otherwise a really usable system.

As far as I’m concerned, this feature is 2 years late!

http://bexhuff.com/flickr-finally-adding-video

George Huff

I felt the same way when I came across that news. Pick one thing you are really good at and focus on it. Google’s homepage is a prime example of keeping it simple, hopefully they don’t go down that road.

In doing so, flickr would deteriorate. Now that new .mac account doesn’t sound so bad.

raphael

It’s time for social networks to be elastic… Facebook repositionning was a huge success. I think Yahoo just consider that everytime some newspapers mention web2.0 application, they write facebook, youtube, myspace & Flickr…

Well… it could be interesting to see if Flickr will success to attract & push such quality as they have with photography. In every case, i hope they will provide:
• better image previews
• > 700kbs bandwith

Paul

Here here! Keep flickr clean.

Socrates Vicente

I don’t like the ideia of having video either. Flickr is good focusing on photography, they should do whatever they can to improve user experience in that field.

Adding video is just going to increase the complexity of the site and turning it to “just another site that supports video” and where quality of contents may suffer.

Despite seeing advantages of narrowing the number of sites one has to visit to access certain types of media contents, I don’t think that bulking all of it is the right way (or else we would all be using Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, etc, to post our photos and videos…).

Let us see what is going to be the video posting policy…

NextCrash » Do One Thing Well

[...] Fred Oliveira has an excellent post up on his blog about how Flickr is venturing into incorporating video into their website. Fred very persuasively argues that Flickr is making a terrible mistake by venturing into online video, and that they should stick to the simplicity of dealing exclusively with photos. [...]

Ryan

I completely agree with you on this. Flickr has to be my favorite service at the moment… I’m not into video, but I still would NOT want video mixed in with my photos, despite how nice “Flickr Video” sounds.

I particularly enjoy the comparison you’ve made to YouTube… what if they were to add video? It’d be nuts and wouldn’t fit with what YouTube is known for. And the same applies to Flickr…

Gino Zahnd

Flickr is also my favorite service, and I design it for a living.

Everyone know these two things: 1) Yahoo isn’t making us do anything and 2) we don’t do things that we wouldn’t ourselves want to use and enjoy, all day long, every single day.

Carry on!

Aki

Flickr is the only place where I showcase my photography works, i like it cause its a clean place. I definitely don’t like the idea of having videos on Flickr. No way!

André

Despite not being an avid flickr user, I can understand what you’re saying. Now, please, read on.

I don’t believe Flickr will loose their philosophy just because they’re adding video. Their target isn’t youtube’s target. They’re targeting vacation videos, offspring first steps and event recordings kind of videos. Of course there will be the eventual amateur coke+mentos video, but like many have said… you’ll probably not even stumble upon them and it will surely be a minority. The flickr crowd is way different than youtube’s. Photobucket users seem to be more in sync with youtube, I’d guess. (and yes, just because most people you know use and love flickr to death, that doesn’t make it #1 ;) hehe)

I, for one, trust the flickr team to keep the video experience as simple and effective as the photos…

Cunaldo

Agreed. I admittedly love Flickr and one of the major selling points is it’s focus solely on photography. I can see where people are coming from with respect to adding videos which would accompany, say, your holiday photos. But, like what’s been echoed above, lets keep that in Jumpcut (why re-invent the wheel?) and perhaps allow you to link to that from within Flickr. That should keep both camps happy enough.

Flickr Video | Scott Mallinson

[...] I have to agree with  Fred Oliveira. No video in my Flickr, please. [...]

Alda

The point here is that platforms often change the way they worked when they were launched and start to have new functionalities that may not suite them the best. Mostly, they change because the want to add everything that others have, in the hope of overcoming them.
Flickr is good for photography, but it’s weird to see videos there – even the layout seems strange….

Something to say?