Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

On today’s Flickr blog there is an announcement for two big upcoming Flickr photowalks. One is in New York on Saturday February 18th and already has 70 people signed up. The other is in Philadelphia on Sunday February 19th and already has 23 people signed up.

While these numbers are not as big as some of the photowalks that have been taking place over the past year through other sites, it is very interesting to see Flickr begin to get more active in the photowalking scene.

Even more impressive is what appears to be a brand new elegantly designed community page for meetups by Flickr at meetup.com. I played around a bit with the site and was very impressed — it’s much better designed than Yahoo’s own upcoming.com site and likely to attract much bigger participation in walks going forward — especially if promoted on the Flickr blog and through other official Flickr channels.

It’s also interesting to see that Flickr’s Head of Product Markus Spiering himself has organized and will be attending the two upcoming East Coast walks personally. Spiering is the guy who runs Flickr, so having him on the walks is a very visible way to show support for these kind of community events.

In the past I’ve been critical of Flickr for being out of touch with their users and the photo community. Earlier this year Spiering promised a “renewed focus” from Flickr this year and certainly beefing up community events, his own personal involvement, along with a page dedicated to these sorts of events by Flickr is a great way for Flickr to begin better re-engaging the photo community.

As a West Coast dude I won’t be able to attend these walks, but I love seeing this sort of community involvement from Flickr.

Today seems to be the first day that Flickr has blogged about the site — so far 142 flickr people have signed up from 33 different cities. It will be interesting to see what sort of momentum this site can attract.

Yesterday photo hosting site Snapjoy launched what they called a “tongue-in-check” promotional page called Flickraft. The promo page provided a tool that would allow users to transfer their photos from Flickr to Snapjoy directly via the Flickr API. According to Snapjoy, in two hours their users imported over 250,000 photos and then they had their API key disabled by Flickr.

In Snapjoy’s case they likely ran afoul of some of Flick’s basic API Guidelines and Terms of Use. Here it spells out what you can and can’t do with an API key. A few of the things that you *can’t* do according to the API Guidelines and TOU:

“Don’t abuse or overtax the API. This means that if you build an app that excessively strains the Flickr servers, we will expire your key per the API. Don’t Use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com. Don’t Display more than 30 Flickr user photos per page in your application or use an unreasonable amount of bandwidth.”

Snapjoy also borrowed from the Flickr branding/logo (which is also prohibited) in crafting a clever marketing message making Flickr look like the Titanic.

I suspect that the API disable wasn’t done manually by anyone at Flickr, but that rather when they transferred over 250,000 photos that they probably tripped some sort of API limits put in place to more generically protect against abuse.

I reached out to Jaisen Mathai who used to work at Yahoo and now is working on a new initiative called Open Photo which would allow users better control over their photos and here is what he had to say:

“API rate limits are a double edged sword. From the provider (Flickr) side it’s required to curb abuse (which Yahoo! gets a crap load of, I was involved in these efforts during my employment). The other side is that things which aren’t exactly abuse often find a nice home under the “abuse” umbrella. This includes “export all of my photos to another site so I can stop using Flickr.”

Still, in the great big world of Yahoo bandwidth, should there really be a limit that prevents another site from transferring more than 250,000 or more photos from Flickr to their site. If this is the case, then many other more successful ventures in the future (like Google Photos or Mathai’s Open Photo) would effectively also end up locked out of the Flickr API.

Personally one of my concerns with regards to Flickr over the years has been functional lockin. While Flickr has given lip service over the years to data portability, in actuality, for the vast majority of flickr users, getting your photos out of the site is anything but easy.

One way to get your photos out of flickr is to use the service Backupify. But in order to use this option you can’t have more than 50GB of photos on Flickr (I have way more than this) and you have to pay them $19.99/month. You can also try some of the free apps that are out there like Bulkr or Downloadr. But these have serious flaws as well. Downloadr is PC only (I’m a Mac guy) and Bulkr limits you to 500 photos at a time (not ideal for someone with almost 68,000 photos on the site like me). I tried Bulkr a while back and found it buggy and not very easy to use. Relying on free apps designed by third party developers in their spare time hardly seems like an ideal solution.

Using the API to directly transfer photos from Flickr to other services is by far the fastest easiest way for users to get their data out of Flickr. A few weeks ago when I decided that I wanted to start selling prints of my photos I transferred about 5,000 of my 67,000 flickr photos from Flickr to SmugMug. I was *blown away* at the speed with which these photos moved over. Getting these photos transferred over to SmugMug was super easy. I used an app called SmuggLr that works as a Firefox extension. [Disclosure, SmugMug is a sponsor of our Photo Talk Plus show, tune in tonight at 8PM PST!]. It was fast, flawless and efficient. The way data portability ought to be.

SmugMug of course is a paid premium site geared more towards higher end photographers who want to sell their prints rather than simply a free photo hosting site like Snapjoy, so Flickr likely considers them less of a direct competitor and so they probably don’t consider them as “replicating or attempting to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com.”

As a free hosting service, sites like Snapjoy might likely be considered much more direct competitors to Flickr… but then again, so might things like Google Photos or Open Photo.

The still unanswered question is, shouldn’t we as users have the right to move our data around smoothly and freely? After all, these are OUR photos right? Personally I’ve always been a big fan of Google with regards to data portability. Not only have they come out very publicly in supporting data portability with their Data Liberation Front, they actually show you how and have built a tool to make it super easy to export your photos out of Picasa.

As far as Snapjoy the site goes, I set up an account there a few years ago. It’s interesting. They seem to be going after more of timeline sort of thing (like Facebook’s timeline) than a direct community based photo sharing thing. There really is no community or photo sharing there at all. I can’t send you a link to one of my photos as far as I know — it’s more just a personal place for me to look at my photos in archive view. I didn’t really get much out of it so I haven’t used it at all since checking it out initially. I can already look at my photos in archive view on Flickr so I didn’t really see the point.

It is probably worth noting that Snapjoy also does not appear to have an API, Mathai thought that this was their biggest mistake in terms of trying to enable a Flickr to Snapjoy exporter.

“I applaud the SnapJoy team’s effort and am always on the side of startups. Their biggest mistake was not having an API themselves,” said Mathai.

“It might not have any impact on getting their API key whitelisted or reenabled, but it would give them a leg to stand on. The marketing of “get off a sinking ship” conflicts with the fact that they don’t have an API and “coming soon” doesn’t cut it. So in reality, your photos are safer on Flickr than SnapJoy because Flickr at least provides tools (though they may cripple it by rate limiting) to get your photos out. Moving from Flickr to SnapJoy is moving from one silo to another.”

More from TechCrunch, The Next Web.

Update: Michael Dwan, co-founder of Snapjoy, just emailed me back and said that as of this morning, they have not heard back from Flickr.

We’re happy many people got a chance to use the importer and many more are still asking for the functionality to return. We’re also thrilled by the response from people who made it into the beta. We’re working to bring the functionality back and have rewritten the offending code so this isn’t a recurring problem (for Flickr or any other site we integrate with).”

Twitter was a buzz yesterday with tweets from current and former Flickr staffers regarding a round of layoffs that took place at the popular photo sharing site yesterday. One of the most upset seemed to be former Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill who wrote a scathing post calling Yahoo/Flickr out over the firings.

“Flickr lost several good people today. If you had me name the top 10 Flickr employees that loved the site the most, half of them got handed pink slips today,” wrote Caudill. “Yahoo made a major mistake today and there’s no other way to interpret it. I’m mad and this is my soapbox.”

Equally troubling, Caudill seems to indicate that the layoffs were merely a symptom of a larger problem of Yahoo suits being out of touch with what is one of their most beloved properties by users. “Flickr-the-site will be fine but Flickr-the-culture took a huge hit today and those suits in Sunnyvale balancing some column or doing their thousandth “re-org” are completely to blame. I bet they don’t even know what they’ve done and that’s probably the worst part of the whole thing,” Caudill continued.

It’s interesting that layoffs at Flickr would be one of the first moves made by Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson. I wrote an open letter to Thompson shortly after his appointment as CEO suggesting that Flickr represented one of Yahoo’s best chances for success with social. Flickr has been losing unique visitors (according to compete.com) over the past 6 months as competitors like Google+, Smugmug, Instagram, 500px and even Facebook continue to pull some of the best users away from the site — by the way, facebook is currently in the process of redesigning their photos page (it looks an awful lot like they are copying Google Photos here) and employees have been reaching out to popular photographers, promoting them on their new suggested user list, etc.

After flubbing a new product release (some sort of unusual chat with other users while you doodle on photos thing) that Flickr killed four months after launch, you have to wonder if laying off what are perceived as some of their best Flickr employees really makes the most sense as Flickr Chief Markus Spiering tries to push forward with the promised innovation that he blogged about earlier this month. On the other hand, sometimes in order to effect significant change you need to clear house. Sometimes a culture needs to be broken before it can be rebuilt and maybe this is partly what this is about as well. Perhaps this is more of a rebuilding to allow Flickr to clear the deck so to speak to build something better and stronger.

Still, if Flickr is planning on coming up with something better, it had better move quickly. It seems like post after post on Google+ these days are about how much users LOVE Google+ for photos/community and how many photographers are not renewing their paid Flickr Pro subscriptions due to a superior community culture at Google.

It is telling to me that newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson still does not appear to have even bothered to set up a Flickr account. By not having a Flickr account Thompson is publicly showing how little regard he has for the popular Yahoo property. It takes 2 minutes to tell an administrative assistant to set up a PR oriented public account and post a few old vacation photos on it.

That Thompson can not even be bothered to do that much makes me wonder not only what sort of message this sends to the day to day employees working on Flickr, but if Caudill might just in fact be right about the suits down in Sunnyvale having no possible clue about what they even have with Flickr. Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz never could be bothered to set up a Flickr account either.

By contrast, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is not only sharing his photos on Google+, he even showed up for a hangout that I was on with popular photographer Trey Ratcliff last week to personally talk live about some of his photos and his favorite photos by others. I’m surprised that a billionaire founder of one of the most successful tech companies of all time seems to have to the time to publicly support the photo sharing aspects of his product while the new CEO of Yahoo can’t be bothered.

Update: More comments here.

Ex-Yahoo Jaisen Mathai writes an open letter to flickrenos laid off asking them to consider working on his Open Photo project.

Update #2: BetaBeat’s coverage. Thread on Flickr Central. Graphic made by Flickr employee identifying some of those laid off. Andy Baio suggests Flickr management was blindsided by these layoffs.

Flickr mucked around with the pricing on their Pro accounts today. The one year option stays the same price at $24.95. They reduced the 2 year option by $1.50 per year from $47.95 to $44.95 and they raised the price of a year of Pro $2.85 per year for those wanting to pay quarterly to $6.95 per quarter ($27.80 per year).

They also announced said that going forward your account would be set up on auto-renewal.

I did think the blog post on the pricing change was a little misleading where it says “We’re also dropping the price of a 2 year subscription to $44.95 (a savings of $10.95 off the 3 months at a time price).” This makes it sound like Flickr reduced their 2 year account by $11 when in fact they really reduced it by $3 from their previous pricing but now compare it with the more expensive quarterly payment option — but I guess that’s marketingspeak for you.

As far as the cost of a Pro account, it is still a screaming good deal for a photographer like me. Where else could I store 67,000+ full high res photos online for $22.48/year (I do the 2 year option)? Plus I’m participating in the Flickr/Getty stock photography deal that paid me over $500 last month so really it’s like Flickr is paying me, not like I’m paying them.

For many photographers though I think Flickr Pro is looking like a worse and worse deal. Google+ will host an unlimited number of photos for you for free now. Flickr’s free account only will let you access your 200 most recent photos and even worse if you don’t reup for a Pro account they hold the rest of your photos hostage on their site until you do renew.

I don’t think today’s pricing really is much of an announcement at all — and I think you’ll continue to see causal photographers letting their Pro accounts at Flickr lapse while they move to other cheaper alternatives like Google+. I also think that the higher end of the photography market is also increasingly moving away to sites like Smugmug (disclosure, they are a sponsor for our Photo Talk Plus show) which are more geared as high end galleries to actually sell your photos. Flickr doesn’t allow you to sell your photos on the site yourself.

Are you on Flickr? And if so will you renew your Pro account when it comes due? And if you do what option would you choose as far as paying for it?

Back at the end of September I wrote a post critical of Flickr’s latest new feature “Photo Session.” The new feature seemed laughable to me and indicative of a more general trend of flickr just not really getting it when it came to innovation.

The feature allowed you to chat (old skool AOL style) with other users while looking at a photo together. You could also draw little doodles on the photos one at a time. Well apparently nobody is using the thing and as such they are taking it out back behind the barn (with the donkey in it) and putting it down.

Flickr Chief Markus Spiering blogs from the Flickr Blog: “Photo Session is a feature that offered a real-time way to share photos with other people in a browser, with no additional apps to install. The feature had been developed as a technology showcase, but has not seen the user adoption we were hoping for. The feature will be turned-off by March 20…”

In today’s world where we can get on Google+ live with audio and video and use screen share, Photo Session seemed like such an archaic outdated thing to even be launching. I could see a possible application with flickr porn, but because flickr didn’t allow you to share adult oriented content this way it didn’t even have an application there.

Flickr also announced today that they will be ending Picnik as well (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone now that Google — a Yahoo competitor — acquired the Picnik company).

They are also cleaning house in a few other areas, discontinuing support for old browser versions, etc.

Now, on the plus side Spiering blogs that Flickr is starting out 2012 with a “renewed focus,” and promises that this year is going to be “big” and that we will see “significant updates to Flickr’s user experience, new features and offerings across devices.” This is the first time in years that I remember anyone actually talking about improving flickr’s game, let alone the guy in charge of flickr.

Of course, as they say, talk is cheap, so we’ll see how quickly Flickr begins rolling out these new features for us. For what it’s worth, I absolutely agree with their decision to kill Photo Session. Nobody was using it and it was embarrassingly bad. It’s good to see Flickr recognizing this and cutting that loss early.

So how could Flickr impress me in 2012?

Well, there are lots of things they could do. These are some of the top ways that I think they could improve Flickr for users.

1. More robust blocking and filtering tools. When I block somebody on Flickr they should totally be wiped off the planet of my flickr experience. Why let horrible people continue to harass me when I want nothing to do with them. Make them completely invisible. Do it like Google+ does. When I block someone anything they type anywhere on Flickr should disappear for me. Any comment on any photo. Any comment in any group thread. Anywhere. Nuke them entirely as far as I’m concerned. Make the bad crazy psycho people go away.

Also let me filter out things I don’t want to see. This is especially true with group threads. Let me choose to hide a group thread and never have to see it again. Also let me be able to choose to hide all photos by a certain user. Make these photos now disappear from search and everywhere on the site for me. I hate it when I do a search for “Austin” and have to see the same photographer come up over and over and over again with photos of Utah simply because he’s tagged his photos with Austin.

2. Create a basic group thread reader for mobile. Group threads are the lifeblood of social on Flickr. Make it as easy as possible for people to track their group threads. A simple text reader for group threads should be easy enough to implement.

3. Give me circles for my contacts. Right now Flickr only has two ways I can categorize my contacts friends/family and contacts. I need more buckets. Let me create circles of San Francisco photographers and neon photographers and Super close friends, and people I’ve photowalked with, and all kinds of other ways of organizing these contacts.

4. Let me browse a version of Explore by circle. Why force me to have to look at all of those crappy watermarked photos in Explore today by strangers. I don’t want to see those. Instead what I want to see is the most interesting photos from the past hour/day/week/month by whatever circle I want to browse. I want to interact with photos from my friends more than I want to interact with photos by strangers. Sure, give me an option to browse the section by “everyone,” but also give me the ability to filter it by whatever circle I want.

5. Get rid of the secret Explore blacklist. I was on it for over 2 years before they took me off it. It’s unfair. it makes Flickr feel hostile. I was talking with a user the other day who said that he thought he’d been blacklisted because his stuff was too Christian. Whether that’s true or not, knowing that users can be secretly blacklisted is harmful for community. Not knowing why you were blacklisted or even if you are blacklisted raises all kinds of suspicious worrying and concern.

6. Integrate SuprSetr into Flickr. Building albums by hand is so last decade. Let me build albums by keywords. Have them automatically update. Flickr says they are looking to hire engineers. Hire Jeremy Brooks, the creator of SuprSetr and have him build this tech out for you.

7. Refresh the most recent photos by my contacts page. Flickr’s former designer Timoni West last year called this the most important page on Flickr and it’s in desperate need of an overhaul. Let me customize this page way more. Right now I can view photos 4 ways in this section: the last single photo by my friends and family, the last single photo by my contacts, the last 5 photos by my friends and family or the last 5 photos by my contacts.

This is wayyyy too limiting. Why such arbitrary numbers? Let me decide how many I want to see, the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 100, unlimted, whatever. Let me set any number I want here. Also let me filter it not just by my friends/family/contacts. Let me filter it by any flickr circle I want to. “Super Close Friends” “San Francisco Photogs” “Great Google+ Friends Also on Flickr” “Flickr Employees” “Bad ass HDR Shooters” “People Going on my Death Valley Trip” whatever. You get the idea. Let me filter this section by the most recent photos of whatever group of people I want.

Markus, I admire your resolve on making Flickr a better place in 2012. It’s refreshing hearing something like that from the top dog on Flickr. Now let’s see if team flickr can deliver.

Hi Scott,

I will try to be brief (it’s not easy for me), I’ve got a lot of work to do over at Google+ today (which is where I’m spending more and more of my time) — we have a photo hangout show there tonight that I should be working on right now.

First, congratulations on your new appointment as CEO. As a long-term critic of Yahoo I wish you the best and believe every new CEO deserves a fresh chance. I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams. The Street does not like the news of your appointment, but Yahoo’s stock would have probably gone down with *ANY* CEO appointment. The Street wants Yahoo to be sold off and your appointment makes that likelihood a little more murky (why hire a CEO to come get a boatload of severance cash if you’re just going to sell the company in 2 weeks anyways — unless the CEO is being hired to actually sell the company).

I’m going to give you some advice about Yahoo. It probably won’t make a bit of difference (it didn’t for Carol).

1. Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late. Social is key. Social is winning. Facebook is social. Google is social. Twitter is social. Every great web company *must* incorporate social going forward. It’s imperative. You can start from scratch or you can try to leverage your best shot at social which is Flickr. I know Flickr is not the most profitable thing Yahoo does — and I know that profits are very important to CEO types like yourself, but trust me, forget about the immediate profitability, social IS important for your longer-term sustainability.

Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far for social on Google+ — with *NO* advertising or paid accounts. Why? Well for many reasons that have nothing to do with short-term profitability, but just assume that they can siphon off even 1% of the supposed $100 billion value of Facebook, that’s a billion dollars for spending a few hundred mil. Not a bad return. Of course they have plans to siphon off *FAR* more than just 1% and far better ways to monetize things in the longer run beyond even just the network itself.

2. It will be challenging to turn flickr into a full fledged social network. Too many people think of it as a photo sharing site. This is one of your challenges — but fix social for photographers and you’ll pull in other accounts… maybe. But the competition for social is fierce. The competition wants what little photo social Flickr has left by the way. They are siphoning it off right now as we speak. There’s a reason that Flickr’s uniques are down 20% since June (according to Compete.com). Look at this last flickr post by Ingo Meckmann. Ingo’s a great photographer by the way. This is what is happening to Flickr right now. Photographers are leaving. Google+ is siphoning off your flickr accounts and you’re losing your best social asset at Yahoo. Ingo’s move away from Flickr is just one of many, many, many such moves.

3. Flickr lacks vision and a leader. Maybe this is because most people at Yahoo don’t care about Flickr (again, it’s not the most profitable thing in the world). Maybe this is because Yahoo cannot recruit a strong leader. I don’t know. Again, this is your challenge. I’ve been on Flickr since 2004. Remember when Bradley Horowitz bought Flickr for Yahoo back in the day? Back when Stewart Butterfield ran the show there. Stewart was a bold visible leader. It helped that he was cofounder of the site and it was his baby, but he was a big personality who was out there banging the drum, interacting with the community, selling flickr to the world. Even if you didn’t always agree with his management decisions, he was at least visible.

Who is selling flickr to the world now? Nobody, that’s who. Do we even know who the General Manager of Flickr is anymore? Who is out there drumming up Flickr photo walks like Google+ is doing? Nobody. Who is out there talking about weekly Flickr innovation? Nobody.

Look at the big bold leadership of Google+. Look at Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz — the very top guys. These guys are constantly promoting their baby. They live and breath it. It’s in their blood. I had a little censorship hiccup over on Google+ the other day and within about 10 minutes of posting about it at 1am in the morning Vic Gundotra himself responded to the issue and it got fixed. Go to their Google+ accounts and look at what they are posting. Now look what your Flickr Chief is posting (sorry Markus, nothing personal). Who is rallying the troops at Flickr? Who is leading the charge?

4. You have an excellent opportunity to turn Flickr into a stock photography powerhouse and you should. Why? Well for two reasons. First off there are only two companies in the world today who can compete with Getty Images. Google and Yahoo (with Flickr). It’s a multi-billion dollar industry ripe for disruption. But secondly, if you really reformed the stock photography market you’d attract all of the best photographers in the world today to Flickr. If you came out with something fairer than a 20% Getty payout and you really put the muscle behind promoting Flickr as a stock powerhouse, you’d retain many of your top photographers who are leaving and you’d attract many more. It’s a hook, and a big hook, what social person doesn’t like being *paid* to be social? Best of all, you get a cut. How many bored housewives with cameras are sitting out there who wouldn’t want to earn a few extra hundred bucks a month? Make this dream come true not just for some of the accounts on Flickr, but open it up to literally everyone.

5. Innovate, innovate, innovate. Apparently you are a tech guy. Flickr needs circles (like Google+). You need to spend about 3 weeks studying Flickr Groups and why they are one of the stickiest social things on the web over the past 10 years. Alot about Flickr Groups need to be changed (you need more robust blocking tools, you need better ways to track threads across groups, you need to integrate group threads into your mobile experience, etc.), but at core, they are highly social little mini social systems buried deep inside of Yahoo. Figure them out. Free them. Promote them. Use them to their full potential instead of letting them languish in obscurity buried in the basement of flickr.

6. Get a flickr account yourself. I gave Carol this advice too and she never took it. Really. You are CEO of Yahoo. You *should* at least have a flickr account. It would be best if you really used it of course, but even if all it is is a puppet account that your assistant posts vacation photos to for you, do it. If you don’t support your own product, why should we? More importantly, what kind of message does it send to your employees working on Flickr if you can’t even be bothered to set up an account.

7. Overhaul community management at flickr. It’s gotten better now that Heather’s out (I finally got off the Explore blacklist that Heather always denied ever even existed), but barely. Follow Google’s lead and beef up the community management team (I think Google has like 20 community managers or something like that). Get folks in there who will interact with the community, who will promote the community, who will celebrate the community.

Look at Vic Gundotra’s last post over at Google+. What is it? It’s a post celebrating an interesting article by Trey Ratcliff, one of the photo community leaders who has emerged on Google+. How do you think it makes Trey feel when Vic Gundotra himself comes out and brings up one of his posts? How do you think it made Mike Elgan feel last night? Look at how popular a flickr account Trey has. Who at flickr is reaching out to him and making him feel as special as Vic is making him feel? Who is community management?

Vic is leading by example here. And his community managers are doing the same thing. That’s so smart. This is one of the many reasons why Google is winning at social. I hope Brian Rose and Chris Chabot and Natalie Villalobos and Michael Hermeston and Ricardo Lagos and tag team of Dave Cohen and Vincent Mo, and Tony Payne and Chew Chee and Sparky and soooooo many more Googlers got big fat year-end bonuses at Google, because they deserve it (and wayyy more Googlers that I know I left out, sorry).

Where is the community manangement at Flickr? Where is the outreach? Where is the social?

Finally, try this. Hop on the Verge’s (don’t you love cutting edge new tech sites?) article about your new appointment today, or wherever and ask the question, “what is the best internet property that Yahoo has today?” Watch how many people say Flickr. Flickr represents your best chance to funnel positive technology out of Yahoo in a highly visible way. People care more about Flickr than any other Yahoo property. It’s highly, highly visible, despite profitability issues. Let your other sleepy little businesses provide the profitability why you hold Flickr up as your beacon and proof that Yahoo can innovate. Do something bold. Get rid of the paid account. Facebook and Google+ don’t charge for accounts. I know there’s probably a big gasp there as paid accounts are probably the number one thing contributing to Flickr’s profitability at present, but do it anyways. People will love it. It will get great press. It will be a big bold move and a signal that Yahoo has much bigger plans for profitability going forward than paid Pro accounts.

That is all Scott. Best of luck. If you ever want to talk about Flickr, I have many, many more ideas on how you can turn that failing ship around. Show us you’ve got what it takes.

A few months after Google+ launched, I wrote a post called Flickr is Dead. “Anything is Dead” posts usually get alot of attention. Most products have their evangelists and their detractors and both tend to be polarized by such charged language. When I wrote that article, I wasn’t pronouncing the literal death that day of Flickr, but rather pointing to a shift that I was seeing take place in the online photo community.

The photo community was moving en masse from Flickr to Google Photos.

This trend has continued to accelerate over the past 6 months and I still stand by my initial pronouncement of flickr being dead.

Measuring online traffic is never easy (please don’t harp on how inaccurate or unscientific measuring online traffic is). The best we can do is guess — but sometimes some of the tools out there do tend to confirm what we’re feeling from the ground.

Google+ opened to the public for invite beta in June of 2011. The month before, according to compete.com, flickr racked up 22,794,460 unique visitors. Earlier this week compete released their November 2011 numbers and flickr has steadily declined down to 18,088,563 now. This represents a little over 20% decline in unique visitors and the lowest traffic number for flickr in over a year.

Anecdotally this feels about right to me as well. For most of the past few years, according to my own personal flickr stats, most days my flickr views fall between 11,000-16,000 views per day, with probably about 13,000 per day on average. The past few months I’ve been noticing that the number has decreased and is closer to the 10,000 mark. I’ve had two days in fact over the past month where my stream actually got less than 10,000 views. 9,968 on November 27 and and 9.978 on December 2. This is despite being added back into the popular Flickr explore area of the site (I was blacklisted by flickr staff from this part of the site for most of the past 2 years) and continuing to publish every day as usual there.

Last night in a Google+ hangout I was talking with another popular Flickr user +Billy Wilson. Billy said the drop off at Flickr felt even bigger to him. He said that photos of his that used to get thousands of views are now getting views in the hundreds instead. I’ve talked to other flickr friends who have noticed similar drop offs in their own traffic on the site.

Meanwhile, the photography traffic on Google+ could not be more explosive. It’s hard to track the individual views on Google+ for photos (you have to go to Picasa to see this) but as an example here is a photo that I posted to Google+ earlier this week. According to the Picasa views it’s racked up 12,919 views so far (the vast majority coming from Google+). The same photo on flickr (and one of my more popular flickr photos) only has racked up 1,033 views. Pretty much every photo that I’ve ever posted to Google+ vs. posting it to flickr has generated dramatically higher views on Google+.

Interestingly enough, the person in that photograph that I just cited, Shannon Jackson, is another former high profile flickr photographer who has moved her account to Google+. This was her post back in September — read through the comments to get more of an anecdotal sense of what is going on. There are posts about people leaving flickr and moving to Google+ all over Google+ just like that one. That’s just an example.

There are a lot of reasons why this shift is continuing to take place. Here are some of the main ones.

Google has invested heavily in the photography community. They have a talented community management team dedicated to Google+ and many engineers also do personal outreach. The entire company (and even part of employee compensation as has been widely reported) is dedicated to social. Googlers show up at community oriented events. They are part of the community itself — highly visible and engaged.

Google is innovating, rapidly. Just this week I got invited to the new On Air Hangouts feature. This is a beta feature rolled out to just a handful of accounts right now, but it’s the future. For the first time last night I hosted a hangout that we broadcasted publicly on Google+. We’ll be able to use this new feature to both broadcast and record our new photography video show Photo Talk Plus (check out this week’s episode with photographer and NASA Astronaut Ron Garan) that people will be able to watch live on Google+ and the Vidcast Network as well as watch recorded later on YouTube too.

Google Social Chief +Vic Gundotra just this week stepped the bar way up by adding his #seasonofshipping hashtag to a post announcing that to thank the community on Google+ that Google would be shipping a new feature each day for a week. Come on Blake Irving, instead of tweeting about Katie Couric and Dubstep how about offering us a #seasonofshipping for Flickr?

Speaking of hangouts. These are like social superglue. Flickr had something cool going on with groups, but hangouts blow groups away. There is something about interacting with someone with audio and video live, being able to share screens and photos, etc. that is just hard to describe. In our hangout last night we were watching +Ricardo Lagos edit a photo of his live. I couldn’t help myself and kept interjecting about how he might edit it. When you interact with people this way you become better friends then in a text based only way like on Flickr. Oh and who stopped by our hangout to say hi? The product manager for Google Hangouts himself +Chee Chew.

Flickr continues to fail at innovation. The most recent two innovations that flickr shipped were really poorly thought out.

Their Android app is really boring. It misses some key functionality. I can see my contact’s photos for example, but I can’t filter them by my friends, so it makes it less useful. When they show me my recent activity, they don’t show me how many faves my photo has received. And why in the world did flickr not include a reader for group threads in the mobile app?

Really Steve Douty, this is what Yahoo means when they say they are going to “Nail mobile?” Really? This is how you are going to take on Instagram, with this crappy new Android app?

The other innovation that they shipped is almost laughable — “Photo Sessions.” This feature allows you to share a flickr photo with a friend and text chat about it. Text chat? Really? As in old AOL text chat chatrooms? No audio, no video, just text chat, oh and you can doodle on photos like put a fake moustache with a MacPaint type pen tool on your friends photo that they are sharing — like photo etch a sketch. Nobody is using this “feature” of course.

Instead of improving the page that one of your former designers called the most important page on flickr (which has desperately needed an overhaul for years) you ship this crap?

The one area where flickr does have a chance to advance on social is with Flickr Groups. But these have been ignored by flickr. They have not improved groups in years. Because Flickr lacks effective blocking tools griefers, harrassers, trolls, etc. are allowed to pollute the flickr group infrastructure. I’ve watched so many accounts leave flickr recently over personal harassment. They’ve made no advancement towards giving groups mobile tools. There is no intelligent thread management for Group conversations (you should be able to mute or hide threads you are not interested in).

Yahoo is a miserable dead place to work and Google is an exciting interesting place to work. I think part of the reason also why Google+ is pulling folks away from Flickr is that they are able to get better people to work for Google. Google is winning. People want to be on a winning team. Not only that, social clearly is one of the most prestigious places to work at Google. Meanwhile flickr is laying off staffers. Yahoo is sort of sitting in no mans land right now. Will they be bought, won’t they be bought. Will they be chopped up, won’t they be chopped up. The press if full of negative stories about Yahoo every month while positive stories about Google abound.

Now, what some will point to is that Flickr still technically has a superior product to Google Photos in a lot of areas. This is absolutely the case. I’m sure +Dave Cohen and +Vincent Mo — who deserve big bonuses this year — are tired as hell of me asking for SuprSetr on Google+ over and over and over again. Set/album management at Flickr *is* superior to Google Photos right now. There are other things Flickr does better too. I made $552 last month through the Flickr/Getty photos deal. That’s sort of a compelling reason to use a site, the fact that they pay you $500 a month to use it. Google has no stock photography offering (yet). I think archived Flickr photos get more search traffic than Google photos (but remember Google is king of search and this will change in the future as they grow).

It’s easy to point to these feature advantages as proof to the continued viability of flickr, but don’t get distracted by features. Flickr is where it is 98% because of *social* photo sharing. That is their foundation, their core — and Google is now doing social photo sharing better, much, much better. The rest of the feature stuff will come with time, but Google understands the key to winning photos on the web is to create not just a technically great photo sharing platform (which they are doing), but in making photo sharing as social as it possibly can be. Photos on Google+ don’t just get more views, they get more engagement.

There are still places on the web by the way for people to do social sharing in more niche ways. 500px has carved out a niche with super high quality photo viewing. SmugMug (who sponsors my photo video show) has carved out a niche with higher end photographers with a paid high quality customer service platform for photographers who want to sell prints (85% payouts on print markups at SmugMug btw blow away 20% payouts at flickr for stock photography).

As far as the core sort of free photo sharing on the web goes though, Google will dominate here. At least if things keep going as they’ve been going. It is in fact probably too late for Flickr to turn this around now. They probably had a chance about 6 months before Google+ launched. Being the leader in social photo sharing is a powerful advantage, but they’ve squandered their lead at this point and what you are going to see over the course of the next year is a continue decline in Flickr and that big sucking sound that you hear? That’s those photographers one by one moving on over to join the party on Google+.

If you want to follow my photography on Google+ you can do that here.

Update: A robust conversation about this article over on Google+ here.

A few months back I wrote a post “Flickr is Dead.” When I wrote that post I didn’t mean dead literally, I just meant that the soul of social photo sharing was migrating away from Flickr over to Google+.

Over the past few months the tide has begun shifting even more. Photographers are moving in mass from Flickr to Google+ as their primary photo sharing network.

Just like the social crowd moved from Webshots and Fotolog to Flickr a number of years ago, the social photography crowd is now moving from Flickr to Google+.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening and in this post I’ll outline some of the key ones.

1. Google+ has momentum, energy, excitement and has captured the imagination of photographers all over the world. Social photographers want to be a part of something big, something that is growing. People feel that energy and want to be a part of it. It’s hard to actually understand this social magic, but Google+ clearly has it right now for photographers.

2. Google employees are actively engaged with the photographic community. A ton of Google employees are working both online and offline to engage the community. They post their own photos and they interact with other photographers. They use their streams to promote the work of newcomers in the community. They attend photowalks. We just did a Death Valley trip and I think 8 or so Googlers showed up for the trip. They are visible engaged evangelists promoting social photography at Google both online and in person. When was the last time you actually saw someone from Flickr show up for a photowalk?

By the way, you are coming on our Google+ San Jose photowalk on December 8th, right? 74 people have already signed up for it.

3. Google has better tools to manage your social experience. The biggest problem at flickr right now is that the tools to manage your social experience are weak. At Google when you block somebody, they are really and truly blocked. You don’t see them ANYWHERE on the site. Trolls, griefers, stalkers, harassers, etc, can be instantly zapped out of existence on the site with a touch of a button. They can’t see you (unless they log out) and you don’t see them *anywhere* on the site. They become totally invisible. It’s so perfect.

Flickr doesn’t realize it yet but they have a BIG problem with harassment. Blocking people at flickr is weak and ineffective. They still can post on your friends’ photos so that you’ll see them. They still can post in groups that you’re a member of. This is a poison that I’ve personally watched drive many of the best accounts away from Flickr.

4. You get far, far more engagement on your photos on Google+ than on Flickr. It might take a little bit of work and interaction, but once you engage on Google+ you’ll find that every possible metric to measure (number of followers, number of views, number of comments, number of +1s, quality of interaction) is far superior.

I think part of why this is so is because that in addition to photographers being on Google+ there are also a ton of non-photographers. These non-photographers never would have come to flickr in the past because, well, they’re not photographers. On Google+ they are on the site for different reasons but still end up exposed to your photography. Because of this, you reach a much larger audience in the end.

The day before yesterday +Maria Bartiromo reshared one of +Trey Ratcliff’s photos. I doubt Maria Bartoroma would ever have an account on Flickr, but she’s a top account on Google+ and as such is being exposed to great photography every single day.

5. Hangouts are like social superglue. Flickr recently launched this sort of lame feature where you can share your flickr photos with other users and text chat about them — super, super, super, super lame. Nobody wants to do this. Nobody is using this. Text chatting only is so “you’ve got mail” AOLish — it belongs to the last decade, not the next decade.

Google+ photographers are interacting in real time, live with video and audio. I hosted a hangout the other day and over 60 people showed up during it to socialize. +Trey Ratcliff is doing fun and interesting broadcasted hangouts (I’ll be on Trey’s show tomorrow night at 7pm PST btw). A bunch of the female photographers on Google+ just launched a new hangout show called “Life Through the Lens” photography from a woman’s perspective.

On Google+ I can watch +Scott Jarvie edit his photos live in real time. Jarvie generously shares with the rest of us his tips and techniques. I can learn about +Paul Roustan’s body painting photography and how he prints his work and gets it in galleries. Last night I got to hear +Michael Bonocore explain to me how he made this shot with fire and spinning wool.

Hangouts can be planned or spontaneous. When you connect with other photographers it’s connecting with them on a whole different level when it’s face to face and with audio and video. Flickr’s groups helped flickr create small intimate experiences, hangouts are like that x 1,000.

Also because people are nicer to each other when they interact face to face than via text, the whole tone of photographer interaction is enhanced by this tool on Google+.

6. Shared circles lets the community promote great photographers. I’ve shared my photography circles a few times now. People are sharing circles every day. When we share circles it massively promotes other photographers on the site — they get new followers (hence more momentum). An audience for your work can be built so much faster as people end up frequently sharing great circles of talented photographers. Here are two of my posts where I’ve shared my own circles for you to find some great photographers that I’m following too.

7. Circles are smarter contact management. At flickr you just get two buckets. Your friends/family and your contacts. And yet sometimes you need to categorize your friends differently than just those two buckets.

For example: the weekend before last 55 or so of us spent that amazing weekend shooting in Death Valley. With Google+ I was able to create a Death Valley circle and use that to broadcast updates just to that group of people. You can create circles of San Francisco Photographers, Best Friend Photographers, Neon Shooters, Night Photographers, Detroit Photographers (for when I visit Detroit in Jan), etc. The ways to organize your contacts are limitless.

8. Strong Curation and Resharing. Explore is a joke. Even though I’ve been unblacklisted from it now (thanks +Zack Shepard!), I still never go there. The photo quality is poor. You get lots of watermarked photos and sort of less interesting artistic stuff. Rather than have to look at photos supposedly selected by some hokey donkey on flickr, at Google+ if something is particularly good it gets reshared and I get to see it from the people that I follow. These people have much better taste than Flickr’s dumb algorithm.

And then there are other people like +Jarek Klimek who are curating huge sized versions of some of the best Google+ photos offsite at PhotoExtract. PhotoExtract kicks Explore’s ass so hard.

Also when something is featured on Photo Extract or reshared by your friends you don’t get all those dumb sparkly gif awards all over your photo or people begging you to add it to a bunch of dumb groups.

9. Google owns the future of search. No doubt about it. Yahoo is on the way out for search. They tried to partner up with the Bingers but everybody still uses Google. Already Google+ entries are starting to index very highly on Google. If you care about search, if you care about SEO — if you are a professional photographer especially and want to be easily found on Google.com, Google+ is your best way to try and promote your work.

10. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation. You just can’t beat it. People started using hashtags on G+ and Google stepped up and linked them. People were having a problem with trolls in some hangouts and we got a tool to block them right there from the hangout. When +Vincent Mo first built the lightbox view he forgot to give us a button to +1 photos from there. BAMM it gets fixed, as smooth as apples and steak.

(Remember +Vic Gundotra, +Vincent Mo, +Dave Cohen and +Brian Rose should all get hefty bonuses this year, plus +Ricardo Lagos even though he isn’t even on the photos team, oh wait and +Chris Chabot too, and lots of other good Googlers).

Google is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Google+ and the entire company is focused on it. Contrast this with Yahoo who spent last Christmas laying off flickr employees at twice the rate of the general company layoffs. Flickr has stagnated and is not innovating. Google is aggressively expanding and growing Google+.

At 4:25 a.m. this morning Flickr tweeted that they’ve turned on searching within everyone’s favorites. What this means is that everything that you’ve favorited at Flickr has now become much more public than you might want.

Publicizing your favorites has been a hot button at flickr for a while. There have been several threads over the years in the help forum where users have asked to have the ability to make their favorites private. Some users have suggested that Rosie O’Donnell, as a celebrity, has been given a special ability to hide her favorites, but it could just be that she’s never faved anything and that the “Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t have any favorites available to you.” isn’t the best language there. I’ve reached out to Flickr for clarification on that and will update on that when I hear back. [EDIT I heard back from flickr who confirmed that no accounts have a special ability to hide their favorites]

In the past Flickr has said that making your favorites private is not part of the “photo sharing ethos” at flickr and at present there is no way keep these private. But by allowing anyone in the public to now *search* your favorites it now gives people even more control over monitoring your favoriting activity on flickr. I have over 100,000 photos that I’ve favorited on flickr over the past 7 years. Now people have much more granular ways to go through these than paging through 1,396 pages one by one.

Are you favoriting too many photos tagged “self portraits” of a certain “friend?” There’s now a search for that. Have you ever favorited anything tagged “boobs?” There’s now a search for that. Have you ever favorited anything tagged “drugs” OR “pot” OR “marijuana?” There’s now a search for that.

It’s interesting that by contrast, when you a +1 a photo on Google+ it’s not made public beyond the +1 that appears on the photo itself. In fact you can’t even share your +1′d photos on Google if you want to.

Personally I think that flickr should have privacy controls on your favorites. They could make them public by default but allow users the option to restrict their favorites to the rest of their world, or to limit their sharing to their friends/family.

There is a seedy side to why flickr might not allow people the ability to have private favorites and that could be to discourage people from collecting porn favorites or favorites of kid photos — both of which happen at flickr. By forcing people to be public about their favorites, this might make someone hesitate before favoriting something that their spouse or coworker might be able to see.

On the other hand it’s pretty well known that people use bogus accounts for this sort of activity at flickr anyways. It’s not hard or uncommon for users to have a second anonymous free flickr “porn” account. There is a pretty heavy underground flickr porn world that is kept pretty well hidden unless you really know your way around the site well.

Google+, by the way, simply doesn’t allow nudity on the site — which is a whole other conversation.

Flickr announced two new features today, an Android app and something called “Flickr Photo Session” where users can share photos and chat with each other. I’ve not had time yet to extensively play with either of these two new products, but here are my off the cuff initial reactions.

1. Flickr Photo Session. With Flickr Photo Session, basically you can invite up to 10 friends to look at a set or some sort of shared content together on flickr. You can use text chat to chat with each other and even make doodles on the photos as you chat about them.

WTF? Who would ever use this? Are you kidding me? So you mean I can take a slide set of my vacation photos and invite 10 cool friends to *text* chat about them with me? And we can draw a mustache on the statue that I took a photo of and lol wtf roflmao about them? What is this, AOL? Who would ever even accept an invitation to such a horrid experience? Photo Sessions are going to be terribly lonely places. Text chat was so last decade.

Why not just join a google hangout instead where we can all see each other face to face on video/audio (and text chat too if we want) and share our screens and go through a slide show that way instead? Also with a Google hangout I’m not limited to just flickr. I can share any photos anywhere on the web. Also I’m not bored to tears just looking at 1,000 photos of someone’s new puppies or grand canyon photos.

It seems like Flickr tried to model this a little after photophlow. The difference though is that with photophlow people with spare time joined an empty group and could chat about any photo on flickr. By restricting Flickr Photo Session to invitees, nobody is ever going to accept the invitations — who wants to be bored to death? — and the doodling on photos thing may be the dumbest feature I’ve ever seen launched on flickr.

They do allow you to use a url to invite people (so maybe you could tweet that out or something) but really I can’t imagine anyone that actually wants to do this — except possibly and just maybe around some of the mammoth archive of underground porn that’s on flickr.

2. The Android App. The number one thing that flickr should have focused on with building an app is giving people an opportunity to easily interact with each other in group threads.

Groups are where the social on flickr happens. People are addicted to groups. I quit all the groups I was active in after too many bad experiences (trolls, personal harassment, anonymous venomous haters, etc.) but many people *are* still involved in flickr groups. It’s crazy to me that they didn’t put together a basic reader to easily read group threads in the app. Like their other app before (you know that crappy one that Yahoo Mobile made) groups are ignored in the new one as well.

On the other hand, they did do search *very* well in the new app. Specifically I can search for one of my photos and then find it and easily go to the set of photos it’s in. This is great.

Once I’m in the set I can swipe the screen to move across from photo to photo in a nice large oversized lightbox with an elegant title. This is slick. This is a great way for me to show photos to people in real life, at a party, over at my house, at the baseball game, etc. (where they are captive and have to put up with it, rather than respond to a text chat sharing invitation).

The new app has a section for recent activity. This is the most addictive page of all on flickr. Unfortunately they don’t tell you the number of faves your photos have received. This is important. They should add this in.

The new app lets you see your contact’s photos (and you can fave and comment on them). I can’t seem to figure out a way to toggle between contacts and friends though. In my case (I’m an edge case) I’ve got over 20,000 contacts. I’m much more interested in the 400+ people on flickr that I call friends.

Final thoughts. I think Flickr Photo Sessions is the dumbest thing to come to Flickr ever — even dumber than flickr galleries (limiting people to 15 photos that are completely ignored that nobody uses) or limiting videos on flickr to 90 seconds (which also hasn’t taken off ). I’m pretty sure Photo Sessions is going to bomb big time.

The Android app missed the boat by not including groups. It’s better than the miserable previous app that the Yahoo Mobile team built though.

More then either of these two points though, both of these “innovations” come too little too late. On a personal level I’m spending 95% of my photo sharing time on Google+ now and the photo sharing community is rapidly leaving flickr and setting up base there.

I’m pretty much done with flickr other than a repository to just dump photos to, so I doubt I’ll use these new features much at all.

Also Interesting, as part of today’s announcement Flickr Chief Steve Douty also outlined Flickr’s new corporate strategy “Deeply Personal Digital Experiences” going forward which is built around a periodic table of elements. It has all kinds of buzzworthy type things in there like – En: To engage and delight users. – Be: To be where the customer goes. – Si: To deliver personal meaning through science and data. – So: To own real social relationships on the web. – Ec: To build an ecosystem.

Unfortunately as admirable as these buzzwords are coming from Douty, they ring hollow to me and sound just like more goobly gook empty Yahoo corporate speak that they’ve been shoveling at us for the past few years (remember that “the internet is under new management — yours” $100 million marketing campaign?) I responded to Douty’s new campaign here. If Douty really cared about these ideas, he’d address the deeper problems inside of Flickr.

Update: I take it back what I said about there possibly being an application for Photo Session with Flickr’s underground porn archive. Apparently you cannot do a photo session with content unless it is coded as “safe” by flickr. So porn sharing is likely off limits with this new feature.