For example I rarely see anything that interesting in the “Everyone’s Photos” section, mostly just snapshots, nothing of shutterbug quality. It isn’t until I hit the Interestingness section that I see anything really amazing. It also seems that pictures tend to rack up “Interestingness” by the photographers being in self-created and self-moderated groups that are known for high quality shots.

flickr is already a majority of pretty standard snapshot, party pics with a small minority of real quality pictures. It just happens that the minority has carved itself a great niche with their groups and flickr has found a great way to help people discover those pictures with it’s interestingness feature so people like myself that can’t take an artist shot to save his life still get to admire other’s great work.

I’m curious how this move would in any way alienate the shutterbug crowd? The groups would stay the same, the best would still float to the top and in fact I doubt that many Yahoo Pictures folks would even bother to tag their photos so unless you caught a brief glimpse of a newly uploaded photo in the “Everyone’s” section it would more than likely just disappear into the aether.
Perhaps a good lesson to take from this for Zoomr would be how to project the image that you’d prefer Zoomr to be more of a “photographer/shutterbug/photog” community rather than a place to store and sort your photos. When I land on Zoomr the first thing I think of is, “cool, another place to dump my 10,000 random pictures of friends, family and places taken in bad light and with no framing skills.” I don’t really understand that I shouldn’t be putting up those candid snapshots and that I should instead be striving for artist photographs.

I’ve alway felt flickr did a good job of being whatever you wanted to make of it, either a photo dumping and sharing ground for the likes of me or a great place to highlight and discuss your work with like minded individuals, for people such as yourself. I’ve never considered myself a photographer, nor do the many friends I’ve had for ages on flickr, yet we’ve managed to enjoy flickr. A lot of the pictures in the few groups I’m in aren’t even all that good, like in the Guinness group, yet we still get a good sense of community, albeit without the polish of the better photographers.

That said, flickr’s strength is it’s community support among photographers. There’s a load of people who wouldn’t consider themselves photographers (or even own a camera), but have a camera phone. At the risk of being us-and-them-ist, they outnumber us shutterbugs by an order of magnitude.

To Yahoo’s market minded mentality, it’s worth alienating all of the photographers on the planet to get the much larger phonecam crowd.

Of course, that’s all just logican conclusion. What do I know?