This is exactly why I wasn’t happy about Yahoo acquiring Flickr. Major companies can’t let this stuff go, they have to have their hands in everything.
Music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights are among the features that will be available on the new site, Mike Folgner, Yahoo’s general manager for video, said in an interview. Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing site will also be adding video, he said.
I’m a big fan of Flickr, and have been since its inception. I follow a slew of discussions and groups, all of which have taught me a lot about photography. Every question I’ve asked has been politely answered with an often exuberant response. I’m afraid adding video will turn Flickr into something that I don’t want to be a part of anymore. It’ll clearly become less focused on photography and potentially start to attract the slandering nonsense found on sites like YouTube. But, as long as Yahoo makes more money—that’s what really matters.
Comments
Dear Ryan Heath,
We here at Yahoo! Inc. are sorry to hear about your constant disappointments with our company. We strive to be the very best everyday. Today’s corporate battle field is much more ferocious than in years past. At Yahoo! Inc. we try to provide everyone with the greatest technologies available. Our recent acquisition of Flickr is an exciting step for our company. We are convinced that we can continue to make one of your favorite photo sharing sites an even more enjoyable experience.
If you have suggestions please do not hesitate to contact me or any one of my multi-billion dollar friends with your petty ideas.
If you continue to experience disappointment, we encourage you to keep your comments and opinions to yourself. Our team of legal experts are top notch and have nothing better to do than to make sure the FBI inserts a bug into your belly button so you can be tracked by the agents of our system.
Until then, there is no spoon; but please, do NOT follow the white rabbit.
Have a great Yahoo! day!
Sincerely,
Susan Decker and the Yahoo! Inc. Management Team
P.S. We make more money than you!
Awesome. The joke that never dies. Well, at least the names are better than John Deere, Crom Jon, Clamidia, etc. Plus, I’m learning who all of the Yahoo! representatives are, which is exciting.
I wonder what I’d have to post about in order for Blake Jorgenson to comment? I thought the online money management post would have done it. Maybe he’s an introvert.
Hopefully I can get every person on that page to comment at least once, just so I can see who the next ridiculous candidate will be.
We’ve had our eye on you for quite some time Mr. Heath(erson).
We’re willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. All that we’re asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
Here’s an article that directly supports my point-of-view. He made a good point: think of YouTube adding photos. That would be ridiculous. And it’s the same thing with Flickr adding video—don’t mess with a good thing.
Time will tell. I will wait to judge after I use the product. It’s just a lot easier. But I do like the idea of integrating Jumpcut and Flickr.
Yeah, I guess I won’t know for sure until it happens. I just have a bad feeling about it. There has yet to be an online video that has given me that wow-effect that I constantly find when browsing Flickr. Although, that could indeed be a result of my bias toward photography. But I doubt it.
Jumpcut is an impressive online video editing tool, but I think it should stay as its own thing. Obviously, it’s just my opinion, but I’d rather see Flickr keep on doing what they do best, and leave the distracting video out. Otherwise, Flickr could end up with featuritis, which is spreading like wild fire these days.
I have always been a minimalist, and an advocate of the Unix tools philosophy – do one thing, and do it well. I love those simple devices that just plain work. Take the DS Lite versus the PSP – DS Lite sales are unbelievable, whereas the PSP, which has more features, is doing much worse in comparison. But in terms of Flickr adding video or YouTube adding photos, it would feel like a case of mistaken identity. I would no longer see either as a solid service, but rather as a mishmash. When a site focuses on a single thing, it truly shows in terms of features surrounding and related to that single thing. eBay was smart – they didn’t try to mix in the ability to purchase items at any time into the core eBay site – no, they created Half.com and eBay Express. Perhaps they realized that, despite being similar, it just wouldn’t feel right to have the two integrated.
Well put. eBay is a very good example of that. I remember when I used to be a Sony fan. But honestly, they are doing too much. Of course, their specialty (“electronics”) is vague enough to cover a realm of different things, from televisions to mp3 players to gaming stations to anything else electronic, but the same thoughts apply.
When I was camera shopping, the Sony Alpha DSLR had really good specs (on paper). But I was deterred from it mostly because they weren’t in the camera business—they were in the everything business. In fact, the Alpha may have been their first DSLR. Nikon, on the other hand, had been designing and building cameras since 1930. I felt better putting my investment in with the company who did one thing well, over the company who did everything OK.
I have to respectfully disagree. I, too, am a fan of one specific tool doing something very well. I’ve also been a long time Flickr user (with a paid account and everything) and I think they’ve done a pretty admirable job.
Most of my friends use Flickr regularly and it’s a great way to keep up with what is going on. After much pleading, most of my family (including my mom!) has a Flickr account so she can see what’s going on from 3000 miles away. Of course, once in a while I want to upload a video and I use my .mac account. It’s a pain to have to send out a link (mom is NEVER gonna’ get an RSS reader), but that is the only way to really do it. It’s somewhat lame and static since .mac doesn’t allow comments. YouTube is just ridiculous for quality of the encoding as well as most of the content on the site.
The smart thing Flickr did was limit it to 90 seconds and require a Pro account to add video. This raises the barrier to entry a great deal. No music videos, no bored 14 year old with a cell phone video.
The other thing is how well integrated it is. There is no difference on any page between video and photos other than the play icon. My mom doesn’t have to go anywhere else to see the things I want to upload – video or photo. I also have the same controls for privacy so I can keep stuff for my family just for my family.
I really think this is a smart move and don’t get why it seems so widely dissed around the web. I think going for the “long photo” aspect was really smart and they’ve struck a great balance with it.
I, for one, welcome our video hosting overlords.
Aaron—Just in case you’re coming to an old article, I posted a follow-up once Flickr Video was released. I, too, think that they’ve implemented the feature very well. I agree with many of the points you’ve made in your comment.
Ha!
That explains why the article I saw in my feed reader didn’t match the one here. I thought maybe you’d changed your mind and reposted the article or something. I have no idea how I ended up on this story.
Next time, I’ll take a closer look at the posting date.
No, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.
I used to be able to find a post by its permalink with formatted dates. Actually, I still can. So:
http://rpheath.com/posts/2007/08/08/flickr-video-blah
and…
http://rpheath.com/posts/243-flickr-video-blah
both find the same post. Er, that’s the idea :-)
I rebuilt the code base a while back, and converted everything to a more RESTful design. But I didn’t want to break any old bookmarks (like there are any), so I’m supporting both formats, although the latter is the desired format.
However, I forgot to update my feed links, so they were linking to the old format, which essentially filled in the
params[:permalink]hash, so this was executed:Theoretically, that should have been fine. But somehow I missed validations on the permalink to ensure that they were unique (I literally started fresh on the backend). So what happened was, it posted the new post (which I named the same: “Flickr Video”) and created the same permalink. Really this shouldn’t have posed a problem, as I was linking to the new format everywhere. But since I forgot to update my feed templates with the new format, it was finding the post by permalink, and since the other post was older, it returned that one first.
So, there’s the detailed explanation as to why that was so weird. Sorry for the hiccup, I guess I was rushing through stuff when I rebuilt everything :-)
Note: I’ve changed this title to remove the last (and only) duplicate permalink.