Mar 17
Flcikr, 24 Photos per Second
Some months ago when I was accidentally checking the search settings of one of my photos in my Flickr account, I expanded the “Flag your photo” box and found these strange settings in it:
Usually the choices on the left are “Photo”, ‘Screenshot” and ‘Art/Illus.” but this time they were accidentally replaced by “Video”, ‘Screencast” and “Animation/CGI”. Just as every member who has been around the community for more than a year, I knew Flickr was about to introduce video at some point but I didn’t know when, so I headed to Flickr’s help forum to see what’s going on. In short - it turned out to be a false alarm and few minutes after I posted this screenshot they restored the original settings box.
I have always been very excited about videos, after all I am a cinematographer by education and have a history both in television and as a former video/CGI artist, so at that point I welcomed the possibility for uploading some of my old crappy video collages to Flickr. Especially this videoclip which I made from about 200 photo cutouts from my family album.
However, reading the forum talk, I was surprised to find out that there were many people who didn’t want anything that moves in Their Flickr. And after some time I began to understand their point - Flickr is the cleanest Web 2.0 site in terms of design and functionality. It delivers what it promises to deliver and its interface is structured with the sole idea to serve your needs without intrusion. In many respects it resembles an art gallery - you have your white wall, spare use of text on a side and the star of the page is the Photo Itself. Yes, Flickr is about photos.
That’s how my enthusiasm softened a bit. Surely, the introduction of video can’t damage the site by definition. And the people from Flickr staff stated numerous times that they don’t intend to turn the site into YouTube V2. So after I heard the news today about Flickr Video Beta premièring in April and most importantly - read the opinions about it, I suddenly wondered how come so many people think Flickr should, in fact, compete with YouTube. Aren’t we talking about separate experiences here? We do, because if photography and movies were about to merge naturally, they would have do it in the past 100 years. But they didn’t, for some reason.
Hence there are vast amounts of people who don’t want their photos mixed with their videos or at least are very cautious about it because it’s easy to imagine how such a content-oriented site, hosting many good photographers who’s aim isn’t just having meaningless fun but actual communication, can turn into a swamp inhabited by all kinds of short video addicts bringing their low quality crap, waving it in people’s faces.
A large amount of dedicated users already have a problem with animated gifs used by some members for all sorts of group invitations, so just the thought that these could be replaced by slow loading videos is making them want to cut their wrists. I really really hope this isn’t going to happen and that I won’t have to wait for a separate plugin to initialize when I load a simple photo page. Or see a profile. Or check a group thread. Just because YouTube proved to be popular, that doesn’t mean that every other site should be youtubized. This is logic trademarked by Microsoft. They want to dip their fingers everywhere. That’s why Zune is so popular… not!
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