Flickr Added Video

So Flickr, my favorite photo-sharing site (to the tune of 8,450+ photos), has added video.

My initial reaction: What are they thinking?!

Everyone knows that’s the slow, painful path to destruction. Adding extra features that are outside your expertise. Feature creep. And video? [Shakes head sadly and disapprovingly.]

But as I thought about it, it might not be so awful. I like having all my photos online and in one spot, primarily so I can share them with friends and family. It’d be nice to throw the nearly 70 videos I’ve posted online into that pile, instead of having them on another site nobody visits. Plus it’d be nice to have a good video site that’s not YouTube (oh, wait—that’s Vimeo).

On the downside, they’ve got a funky 90-second limit on videos (or “long photos” as they call them—what?!), which is an interesting artistic limit but could also be a just plain annoying limit. They also don’t offer details like the length of the video or the ability to download the original file (one of the great strengths of Vimeo). That’s bad.

On the upside, it comes with a free Frogurt. That’s good.

As you can see, I’m on the fence with this one. I want Flickr to do well, but this feels like an inherently bad move. They’re a photo site. Stick with what you’re good at.

One thought on “Flickr Added Video”

  1. I would agree. I don’t want Flickr to be my all in one media site.
    I want them to stick with what they know – photos.
    I get annoyed with sites/companies that try to do too much.
    Do you think this is Yahoo’s hope of competing with YouTube? Do you think there’s some Microsoft influence already taking hold?

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