December 27th, 2012
Seems appropriate to link back to an episode of Random 60 discussing Flickr. Remember, this was three years ago. “The woman CEO” that I mention in the episode is not the current CEO Marisa Mayer but Carol Bartz. There have been five CEOs at Yahoo! since I recorded this episode!
December 27th, 2012
Danny Nicolas has been keeping up with my Flickr commentary of late about how Flickr should create a more affordable, less feature-rich account type and he has a few things to add:
I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other direction and have the current Flickr Pro offering become the mid-size account, and offer a more expensive Business account that doesn’t have file size or video limitations.
My main argument for why I think Flickr should make a scaled-down account is more about price than about features. I was a paying Flickr Pro user for many years, as was my wife, and we never utilized the account to the full. Though I’m sure more serious photographers do. However, in today’s market of mobile apps and the services that power them, most people will not pay $24 a year to share photos with their friends. And I don’t think the Instagram generation needs Flickr Pro. But I do think they’d pay enough to make it worth Flickr’s while to create a more affordable account with less features.
Creating a Premium account is an interesting idea and is always on the table for SaaS platforms. But I don’t think that is the right strategy for Flickr. I doubt there are many members that are pining for more features or space or video capabilities. They can go elsewhere for video. I believe there is a goldmine of brand new users that are dabbling with Instagram – to the tune of tens of millions perhaps – that would love a few extra features that Instagram simply does not provide (stats, groups, sets, etc.) and all Flickr has to do is price the account just right, and market it properly, in order to suck them all in.
Again, Danny:
Whatever their strategy for success may be, Flickr must evade further stagnation in order to be competitive. They can’t ignore and leave new markets wide open like they did with mobile. They have the opportunity to become a powerful weapon in the hands of Yahoo.
It is amazing to me that so many people see Instagram as Flickr’s failing. But it is obvious. The people that were the innovators in photo sharing missed the boat. I think the problem is that Flickr became a business very quickly after joining Yahoo! It went from being an innovative product that was really trying to solve problems to a business that needed to make money and innovation sort of was pushed to the side. And the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Flickr for years was mind-boggling. I have no idea what they’ve been doing for the last few years.
Danny nailed it when he mentioned cannibalization. Some of the things Flickr should have done over the last several years were no doubt thought of and even sketched out but perhaps decided against for that very reason. They didn’t want to lose current customers. But they may have to do just that in order to grow again.
Yahoo! needs to invest in Flickr. They need to let the team know they can take chances again. They can try and fail and try again. They need resources, talent, and a someone with a clear vision to run the entire thing.
If Marisa runs Flickr like she ran search at Google Flickr will succeed. If she runs it the way Google+, Buzz, and Wave was run she won’t. And there is a subtle difference between the two approaches. Google+, Buzz, and Wave were innovations, no doubt, but without any real value or use case that was obvious. I remember trying Wave for the first time and having no idea what it was for. The products were perhaps a little too innovative. Instagram isn’t so much an innovation as it a well-designed simple solution that brings delight to people every day. Google search is a well-designed (seemingly) simple solution that brings an amazing amount of value to people every day. Flickr should aim for one of those; delight or value. I’d pick delight.
December 26th, 2012
I enjoyed this interview of Quentin Tarantino in the NY Times. Especially this bit on Page 5:
I remember reading a review that Pauline Kael wrote about some director’s big epic, and she said: Now, look, it might seem unfair to judge a talented man more harshly when he tries to do something big than a less talented person who’s doing something easier. But when you try big things, you take big risks, and if you’re trying to do something that is maybe above you and you can’t quite pull off, then whereas before we only saw your gifts, now we see your failings.
I’ve always been pushing that envelope. I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.
I like to think that I feel the same way. If you go big you will sometimes fail but go big or go home.
December 24th, 2012
One niggle I had with the new Flickr app for iOS was the upload progress indicator was far too subtle (though an interesting take on what could be done to make it unobtrusive). They fixed that with this update.
Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly.
December 23rd, 2012
In my recent How Flickr can eat Instagram’s table scraps. I’m Instagram’s table scraps. And so are you. piece I postulated that Flickr needed to make some adjustments and, possibly, make a new account type that was a little less expensive to compete with the free Instagram.
Well, Flickr has done something that I think could be the first big step towards doing just that. They’re giving away 3-months free of Flickr Pro to existing members. This should help bolster the usage of Flickr over the next three months in a big way. This could also help them to determine how people will use the new iPhone app on-the-go (something they have very little experience in since, until recently, their iOS app was no where near as great as it is now) and, perhaps, come up with a new model as I suggested.
Regardless of their reasoning for doing the giveaway – Flickr will be used a whole lot more over the next three months and I’m sure a portion of the people that take advantage of this deal will fall in love with Flickr all over again.
December 21st, 2012
I’ve been using IFTTT a ton lately. I would pay for the service without blinking an eye (especially if it supported things like multiple accounts per channel). This big round of funding is well deserved.
December 20th, 2012
Issie Lapowsky for Inc. on Dublin’s booming tech scene:
Now, despite the country’s ongoing economic struggles, a slew of emerging growth start-ups are flocking to the city of pints and pubs. This year alone, tech darlings including Indeed.com, Hubspot, Zendesk, and, most recently, Dropbox, have opened or announced plans to open offices in Dublin.
I really enjoyed visiting Dublin last year. Geeks want for but a few things; posh surroundings, bikeable neighborhoods, fast internet connections, and lots of amazing beer. Dublin has all of these and much more.
December 20th, 2012
Well, not really. This post is really about how Don Melton doesn’t remember how Safari got its name and how there are a lot of stories to tell you about later.
So, to whoever suggested the name “Safari,” thank you.
Though I’m a Chrome guy now (Safari is just far too slow) I too thank the person that came up with Safari rather than Freedom as the browser’s name.
December 19th, 2012
If you’re a member of a fairly popular web service you’re probably becoming more and more familiar with feature roll outs.
A feature roll out is when a new feature is added to a service for a certain number of users at a time and, after some duration of time, every user on that service ends up with the new feature. This process could take hours, days, weeks.
There are a lot of reasons a company may need or want to do a feature roll out. There are also reasons a company may want to avoid doing them. Lets first look at why a company may need to roll a feature out.
Some features on these large-scale platforms are incredibly taxing on the technology infrastructure of a service. Say, for instance, that YouTube released a feature that allowed its users to re-encode all of their videos into a higher quality than they previously allowed. YouTube has billions of minutes of video. If every one of their users were allowed to do this all at once they’d bring YouTube’s infrastructure (world-class though it may be) to its knees.
Twitter’s recent roll out of a feature that allows its members to download all of their tweets in an archive is another example. While certainly not as intense as video encoding, gathering up tens-of-thousands of tweets and creating a neat and tidy archive of them does take some horsepower. They’ve decided to roll this feature out.
Another, slightly more technical, reason that a company may need to roll out a feature over time would be that they split their traffic onto many different web nodes. Or, actual web servers or clusters of servers. Each of those web nodes being updated at exactly the same time would bring the service down for a short period of time. High-capacity, “always up”, networks like Twitter can not afford to have downtime across all nodes at once. So they may roll out a feature so that their service remains up and running and they only have to pull down one node at a time, moving the traffic that would normally go to those nodes to other nodes temporarily, to update it with the new feature.
But why would a company want to roll out a new feature even if they didn’t need to? There are many advantages and I think one of the best ones that is often overlooked is hype. Remember when Instagram rolled out web profiles? It took the better part of a week for everyone to get their web profiles.
If you don’t see your profile yet, be assured that you’ll see it in the next few days. We’re rolling out profiles to everyone on Instagram over the course of this week.
A week. Even with 100,000,000 users a week in internet-speak is just about one year and three months. But with a certain number of users getting their web profiles each and every day they got an amazing amount of word-of-mouth for free. “Yay! I got my web profile!!” followed by a link on Twitter from a huge percentage of users. If for no other reason then to have Instagram on everyone’s mind for an entire week it was worth rolling this feature out over time rather than giving it out relatively immediately to everyone.
Another advantage worth noting is that by rolling out a feature the company is able to monitor the progress, effectiveness, and use of the feature and has more of a chance to correct things as the feature rolls out. If a feature has a direct impact on the stability or cost of running the service then rolling it out over time gives you a better idea of how well the feature is doing at attacking that goal. If a feature is brand-new and the company wants to see if users will A) use it and B) figure out how to use it correctly – by rolling it out you can get some sense as to how users interact with the feature. This is very advantageous.
Why would a company want to avoid feature roll outs? Announcing features that users do not have yet is always risky business. It is almost never a good idea. Some of the risk falls on user awareness. If a user learns about a feature and gets excited to use it and can not use it for a week they’re likely to forget about it a week later. You’re also likely to create higher expectations for a feature than you’re able to deliver on. I’m sure the Instagram users that got their web profile a week after they were announced had a slightly less excited response at getting them than the ones that did in the first day or two.
Feature roll outs are sometimes a necessity, sometimes a tool, and sometimes a bad idea. Choose carefully.
Any other advantages or disadvantages? Chime in on Hacker News.
December 19th, 2012
MG Siegler, who inexplicably still writes for AOL TechCrunch, writes about people “quitting” Instagram.
The real world: Quit, verb, to leave (a place), usually permanently.
The internet: Quit, verb, to threaten to leave as loudly as possible, usually over something stupid, then do nothing.
I’ll admit it. When I first saw the Instagram news I too wanted to look at my options for leaving the service. But I wasn’t about to delete my account 30 days before the policy would have even been put into place.
I’ve seen people quit Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram only to come back a few days later and need to rebuild their entire accounts under new usernames because they thought better of it. To each their own but at least allow news like this to sink in for a day or two before you make a decision.
December 19th, 2012
Nilay Patel, of The Verge and a guy with a law degree on his wall, chimes in about Instagram’s policy changes.
December 19th, 2012
Great list of tips and features for Flickr’s new iOS application. I particularly like number 3:
3. Apply a single filter to multiple photos at once. Did you fall in love with a particular filter? We’ve made it easy for you to apply it to multiple photos at once. You simply select the photos from your camera roll that you’d like to edit then go to the filter screen and tap and hold the filter that you want for your photos. And just like that, all of your photos are Panda-ized.
I also didn’t realize that you could manage your Flickr Groups from within this application as well. This is a very feature-rich application.
December 18th, 2012
The web has been ablaze yesterday and today about the new Instagram policies. Instagram has written a blog post to ensure everyone that there has been some confusion and they are going to do whatever they can to make everything more clear.
Good. I hope everyone didn’t go and delete their Instagram accounts without waiting until everything really shook out.
December 18th, 2012
Fantastically written piece from my teenaged friend Abby Wagner:
People want to secure material in something more reliable than a single website.
I think she has a future in writing.
December 18th, 2012
Tom Warren, of The Verge, agrees with me about Flickr gaining from this recent Instagram policy change:
With a nicely redesigned client and support for filters, Flickr is finally catching up to battle Instagram on the photo sharing front. And its dormant community of lapsed Pro users (who are required to pay a nominal fee each year) could be awakened after Instagram users realize they’re the product of advertisers. It could be a temporary backlash, the same type we witness whenever Facebook adjusts its news feed, but competitors are ready this time and Twitter and Flickr are waiting in the wings for a share of Instagram’s unhappy user base.
He calls what Flickr charges for its Pro account a “nominal fee” and for what you get I suppose it is. Warren states that Flickr Pro users, like myself, will come out of hiding and reup their accounts. That may be true but I don’t think we’ll see new users jettisoning from Instagram and signing up to Flickr as Pro users. I would, however, see them moving over in droves if there were a cheaper account level that stated, simply, that Flickr/Yahoo wouldn’t use their information for advertising purposes.
Your move Yahoo!.
December 18th, 2012
Before I even get started; Flickr can not stop Instagram at this point. Flickr can not beat Instagram in terms of hockey-stick-growth. Even with Instagram’s recent policy changes Instagram is on a trajectory to hit the nearest star and Flickr nor Bruce Willis can stop them now. But, to succeed they do not need to win – they just need to capture as many Instagram-escapees as possible.
Flickr has long since been very good at a few things; sharing, licensing, and interoperability. It is one of the reasons Flickr was included in Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost; Flickr’s API is world-class and the entire Internet can benefit from its rich offerings.
Instagram being bought by Facebook was the first step in the wrong direction in the eyes of many web veterans. And there are more and more web veterans every single day as the web gets older. Web veterans are people that know better. Web veterans know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t the Internet. In fact, they are the antithesis of the Internet. These companies do whatever they possibily can to pigeon hole people onto their websites for as many hours throughout the day as possible. The rest of the web, the real web, tries to solve a problem for people while playing nicely with every other service out there.
Flickr made the first big step in capitalizing on Instagram’s move to Facebook last week when they debuted a brand-new iOS application that has gotten rave reviews from web newb and veteran alike.
However, Flickr is too expensive for people casually sharing a filtered photo from their mobile cameras now and then. Yes, you can use Flickr for free for up to 200 photos but I think just about anyone with a Flickr account would much prefer to have all of their photos available all of the time.
If Flickr were to change their model just slightly – one from a pro backup and catalog solution to one of sharing – they could easily win a ton of accounts that are falling off of the Facebook/Instagram table on a daily basis. Perhaps creating a cheaper account-type that costs, say $5 or $7 per year, would be enough for the web veterans (again, there are a lot of us) to completely jump ship from Instagram and pony up. This way, we would never have to worry about advertisements, creepy data collection, or wondering if our data will ever be trapped on someone else’s servers. And believe me, this isn’t something that is terrible difficult for Flickr to give a shot. They have everything they could possibly need already in place to do this.
Flickr, you’ve already made one step. Take the next step and bring us all back home again.
December 18th, 2012
In short; Instagram is now going to share your information with its parent-company Facebook in order to serve more relevant ads. Instagram will share things like the places you visit, your interests (remember all those photos you’ve liked?), and even your photos in order to tailor advertising to you.
You can look at this any number of ways. On the one hand, if Instagram is free and we have to see advertisements in order to use it – wouldn’t it be great to see ads that you’d actually like to see rather than ads you really wouldn’t be interested in? On the other hand, it sort of stinks that the photos you share, the places you visit, and the people you know all become currency for Facebook.
This change goes into affect on January 16, 2013. The only way to opt-out of these changes is to literally delete your account.
Just when Instagram really started to become great, they go and make us think they are creepy.
December 17th, 2012
Or, at least soon you will be. The Next Web has all the details.
With over 26,000 tweets under my two-sizes-too-big belt I can say that I’m very happy about this. Twitter has now given me a way to relive the last 6 years of my life whenever I choose.
December 17th, 2012
Todd Troxell, ex-coworker and co-founder of Vid.io, asked an interesting question on Hacker News that got some great responses: Your most productive time. How do you do it?
For me, I’m most productive early in the morning and mid-afternoon when I get back from lunch. I’m worthless just before lunch and anytime at night.
That is, unless I get into Flow. Flow is something that I definitely subscribe to. One of the responders to Todd’s question also brought it up and, like me, feels it is random and unpredictable. I’ve found, though, that you can sort of force Flow by giving yourself deadlines.
Here is a good way to get into Flow every day… write down a task that you know can be handled in a short period of time, tell yourself you have to have it done by a certain time and start working on it. If you finish early then you gave yourself too much time. But if you get the timing right you’ll be working really hard to get that task accomplished. Once you do, you’ll be on a roll. You’ll achieve Flow. Don’t stop. Don’t get up. Just start something else on your list.
I’ve found this has worked for me when I’ve needed to force myself into Flow.
December 17th, 2012
Just about everyone is saying that the new Google Maps app for iOS is a big win for users. But, one thing that is holding it back from being truly great is the level at which it can be integrated into iOS. Well, here is one tip to open Google Maps with Siri that should help.
Now we just need a way to make the Gmail for iOS app our default email application on iOS.
/via Shawn Blanc.