Jandy’s Meanderings

It’s funny to me how upset some people seem to be over Flickr’s recently implemented video hosting.  I really don’t get what the big deal is.  For one thing, this is only new news in implementation.  It’s been rumored that Flickr would be adding video soon for like a year now.  And people keep talking about how Flickr will turn into YouTube.  At least according the current upload constraints, Flickr will only take 90 second videos.  That’s not really going to compete with YouTube (or any of the other video-sharing sites).  And if the fear is that all the crazy people from YouTube (and judging by the general intelligence level of the comments, many of them are) will invade Flickr, which seems to have a higher sanity quotient, I think that’s unlikely.  People already using YouTube will probably keep doing so, and Flickr has a strong community that probably won’t break down because of adding video.  The first example of Flickr video I’ve seen is on MostlyLisa.com, and I’m highly impressed with the quality — I can see a good opportunity for brief videos that are really an extension of the personal photography niche that Flickr has always served (a perception backed up the announcement on Flickr’s blog).  If they stick with the 90-second limit, Flickr’s not really going after the hardcore video-sharing market.

But ultimately, if you don’t want to upload video, don’t. Voila! It’s not like Flickr’s going to require everyone to upload video to keep their account - in fact, only Pro accounts can use the feature, for now at least. Just because a service offers extra options doesn’t mean you have to use them. (One complaint is that the site has been slower/unavailable since the video feature went live, which seems to be true, but is probably a temporary server overload problem. It’ll get sorted out as people get over the newness and Flickr gets everything to scale properly).  So the point of this post?  Eh.  People amuse me.

Posted in tech
Tagged:flickr