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.

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!

I still don’t know exactly what it is, but I’ve posted about it a couple of times. Amazon has an eye for building an underlying layer of services to empower the new web. From their storage service (S3), to the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) - both of which we use on Goplan, our project management solution -, to the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and now their Flexible Payment Service (FPS). No wonder I think these guys rock (and Amazon stock does seem to agree).

What is the Flexible Payment Service

FPS allows you to accept payments ranging from cents to thousands of dollars by leveraging their API. Amazon is pretty much making their payment system (used to charge for S3, EC2 and the other services) available to developers, for their own apps. Here’s the rundown in the words of Jeff Barr (via the Amazon WS blog):

We’ve taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package.

In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money. Once again, we take care of the “muck” and developers get to focus on being innovative and creative.

Some example uses for FPS

If you think about it, it’s really easy to think of ways you can use FPS to build really cool services that would otherwise be hard to bill for. Here’s a few examples, off the top of my head:

• Twitter could use FPS for a pay-per-use pricing model (hey, so they stop losing money every month). You would pay based on the messages you send. This is by no means my recommendation to twitter, but hey, it’s an idea.
• We could start using FPS on Goplan to charge people flexibly by number of projects and users, instead of the fixed plans we have now. Should make it much more interesting for people who want to pay based on usage.
• Online music stores could use FPS to help kids have music allowances that they could use to get new music whenever they wanted, easily.

There’s really a lot you can do with this kind of flexibility, and while I haven’t gone through the FPS documentation myself, if this is as flexible as S3 and EC2, I know this is a winner.

Concluding thoughts

Amazon kicks ass. This could be the only conclusion here, but I’ll continue by saying I’m both pretty excited about trying out FPS on our own services (and those we build for clients), as well as see what other people come up with.

Services like S3 have proven Amazon - despite being a retailer - is also the clear leader when it comes to infrastructure. These guys are helping other developers actually pave the way to new services, not just locking them in like others are. Very smart - definitely very Amazon. I love that company.

Other takes on this story by Robert, John Musser and Pete Cashmore.

Oh facebook. I think nothing really beats it when it comes to hype in the blogosphere, except for (you guessed it) the iPhone. Everybody keeps talking about how Facebook is the next Microsoft, the next Google or the next IBM - and while I have been absorbed by the beast, I can’t help but question those claims, and be a little worried.

Debunking the Facebook glories

Let’s get it out of the way now - it’s a spruced up contact list / social network. The API and applications do give it a lot of flare, but being totally honest, it’s not going to give me much more than a list of friends a a series of metachunks (did I just coin this?) about them.

Interesting, yes. But where’s the real marketable value? Sure, it’s aggregating all sorts of information about people, what they do, and what their friends do - there’s tremendous potential when it comes to advertising. But it’s closed data - it’s a silo. A walled garden - albeit a small wall, considering the apps.

Linked-in killer, MySpace-killer, what?

Facebook is good for what it is - an aggregator of people data. As such, it’s not going to kill Linked-In as a place for people to use their network to tap into the job market. Or ever stop kids from signing up for MySpace to check-up on their favorite artists. Facebook doesn’t kill much except for its own users’ time - which isn’t bad at all.

Now, Facebook could easily evolve into a competitor against Linked-in, particularly because it already does have the same audience - but should it? My personal opinion is that it wont, but I guess we’ll see.

It does have its merits

Facebook does strike me as genius for one thing, though - being the first social network with no one specific social object (something I initially talked about back in 2005), but being completely flexible about it.

Social object is the main thing the social network is about. Flickr has photos, Last.fm has music, 43Things has activities, Twitter has social statuses.

Through the facebook API, they’ve managed to allow external developers to inject any social object into Facebook. A few examples would be the applications to track movie tastes, music tastes, photos, etc. Now that is smart - I’ll go as far as saying Facebook wouldn’t be 1% as interesting if it wasn’t for that.

In conclusion: Facebook is great for what it is, but fails by being a semi-closed system - you can’t get your data out. It locks you in. I don’t think any social network is tackling the lock-in problem properly, and I suspect there may be considerable gains to the one that does first. If networks make it easy for me to leave and take my data with me, I’ll stay - heck, that’s why I’m using Flickr and Last.fm.

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned a specific web-application on this blog, but I wrote a few notes on Pownce to send in as feedback and figured it might be interesting to post them as well.

If you don’t know what Pownce is, lets call it a spruced up Twitter (I know Kevin, Daniel, Shawn and Leah must be getting tired of the comparison, but it does sort of fit) that allows you to send messages, files, events and links. And it looks pretty good design-wise (no surprises there, Daniel keeps doing great work).

What it should do better

Grouping: I want (and I assume many others do too) to be able to send these content bits (the notes, events, links and files) to certain groups of people - in short, I want to be able to categorize, tag or group my friends so I can address them as a group. Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, even though many people asked for it, and Pownce doesn’t either, unfortunately. [Duane in the comments tells me this does exist (apparently it's called sets), which doesn't say a lot for me for not finding it, or Pownce for not being obvious about it's killer feature. I'm extremely glad this does exist!]

It doesn’t make sense for my friends in the US to get the same messages I send my friends in Portugal. This is particularly true for events, because those carry local context.

Findability: I had a really bad time with the friend-finding experience. Searching for friends one by one is not going to work if they number in the hundreds, and browsing friends of friends - which is usually the best solution - doesn’t feel right on Pownce either because they show names as “Firstname L.” instead of the full name or the nickname.

That name display issue and the fact that they show a limited number of people per page (unlike Twitter, that bombs you with icons for each person) makes you want to give up adding new people (I know I did). Fixing that means growth, people - come on!

All things considered,

Pownce is a very neat application. I’m still not sure how many people will be coming in from other services (like Jaiku or Twitter), but if they did the grouping I suggest above thing I’d be moving in a snap - and I’m sure others would as well.

Well, that being said, if you do try out Pownce, feel free to add me up - it’ll be interesting to converse with this blog’s audience (which is now way over the 12.000 people mark). See you there and if you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment here.