• What does the next Flickr look like?

What does the next Flickr look like?

“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan

Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that encouraged people to push themselves to take better photos. It was the first prism with which I looked at how a community website could subtly use game mechanics to drive behavior without building “a game.”

But at this point it feels overly clunky in too many ways. I’m curious what folks feel like is missing in their Flickr experience, but for me the next Flickr would have one huge difference and a few smaller ones.

1. A new orientation, not around the author: virtually every photo site is first prioritized around who took the photo (like a blog). But for almost everyone who is just a casual photo taker this orientation is secondary at best. My kid Kaden just had his sixth birthday and there were probably 5 people taking photos with various devices. Most of those photos I will never see, or they will get randomly emailed and then lost. I wish someone had an elegant and natural solution that actually mapped to how people use photos now. I just want to see the photos from my kids birthday all in one place, in an easy way to share with other friends and come back to a year from now.

Other stuff on my list:
2. Seamless cross-client posting and reading (mobile, mobile, mobile)
3. Public and private clearly delineated
3. Dropbox-style access/syncing of photos
4. Simple group email interface for upload since so much is still conducted that way (make it as easy as Tripit, I want to be able to get a photo from my Dad via email, forward to this service to keep it there but attribute to him)

What’s on your list? And if you’ve already got an elegant solution I’d love to hear about it.

Source: bijan