[BRIEF NOTE] On the fate of Flickr

[rfmcdonald]

I was distressed to read Mat Honan’s Gismodo article ”How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”, substantially because of my own extensive Flickr collection but also because Flickr is, well, normative for me.

The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

Even the notion of Flickr as an archive—as the place where you store all your photos as a backup—is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn't share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Chris Bertram's Crooked Timber post ”The death of Flickr?”, starting with a simple paragraph by Bertram stating that he'd mourn the site's disappearance because of the real-world relationships it fostered, started off an interesting discussion thread.

If not Flickr, what should someone interested in sharing images use?