At the end of last year I wrote:
Web 2.0 is about using the Internet for what it’s good at: building web applications that enable and benefit from human social behaviour on a massive scale.
I came across this recent post by Jason Kottke which might back this up. He notes that Alexa’s traffic stats put Fotolog at number 26 on the list of most popular sites, while Flickr, despite all of Yahoo’s backing, is down at 39. He then postulates a reason for this:
Flickr is more editorially controlled than Fotolog. The folks who run Flickr subtly and indirectly discourage poor quality photo contributions. Yes, upload your photos, but make them good. And the community reinforces that constraint to the point where it might seem restricting to some. Fotolog doesn’t celebrate excellence like that…it’s more about the social aspect than the photos.
And the conclusion he draws is:
Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.
Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg – all intensely social applications built on (with all due respect) what many Web 2.0 pundits would brand as mediocre technology.
Flickr must be doing prep work for something big. Dark-side of the acquisition or not, I think they’re about to be deployed on a global scale. You know, added to the Yahoo! homepage type deployment. Flickr will be the film for Internet enabled phones. That type of stuff.Kottke has interesting insights, but after absorbing what he said, I ask what’s the point?–
I can’t help but quietly applaud flickr for taking a stance on excellence. Humanity has got to get over all this relativism stuff that Maeve Binchy is just as valid as Jane Austen, and so on. Though it looks like cultural relativism is going to run and run for some time.Personally, I find flickr to be an amazingly valuable resource for finding good quality images that I can reuse, without being overly bogged down by mediocre offerings.Of course there’s a place for people’s personal photos. There’s room for both approaches.And yes, I know that your blog is more focused on the social aspect and I understand that. I’m just looking at it from a slightly different perspective.
I want to make a couple of points here. The condition I currently find myself in professionally prevents me from being totally objective so please take that into consideration, but my points are:1. API’s, web feeds, Ajax calls and widgets (flickr badges) may actually hurt flickr’s analytics stats than help them. It is unclear how they count or not count towards their share among photo sharing services.2. Yes flickr’s content and community drive more editorially controlled content that appeals to a particular type of audience. There’s clearly a strong market for this type of photo sharing as proven by flickr’s success, but I believe it’s myopic to assume that’s all that everyone is interested in. It would be a mistake to assume that artistic high-quality content justifies the success of a media sharing service nor would it be fare to assume that’s what most people gravitate towards. If this was true no one would’ve heard of fark, youtube, etc. There are many things users get out of using a photosharing service. Some are in it for showcasing their artistic talent, others are in it for entertainment. There is no one “right” model.