There’s been a HUGE resurgence in Flickr‘s popularity on Twitter lately. Especially amongst me and my tweeps. So what has Flickr done to be cool again? Why is everyone abandoning Instagram, TwitPic, and the rest in favour of Flickr?
In fact, the new Flickr is exactly the same as the old Flickr. It’s still the professional quality photo-sharing/managing/editing web-suite that was hugely popular before. Even their super-powerful mobile apps haven’t changed that much – they were among the most powerful and fun to use even before Instagram came along.
The first thing that happened is Instagram got Facebooked! I said it before, Instagram wasn’t worth $1-billion if Facebook just let it sit there. They have to do something with it; and when they did there was outrage and anger and a stampede back to Flickr!
The other thing, is Yahoo – credit to their new commander-and-chief Marissa Mayer – finally realized their most valuable property is Flickr. No one cares about Yahoo Auto, Yahoo Dating or Yahoo omg! These are copy-cat services in that there’s a million of them out there and if you’re not number one you’re irrelevant.
Although there’s other choices for sharing your photos, the social aspect and the community are very important. Other’s have tried, but Flickr has made professional (community and tools) their priority though they’ve still kept it easy to use.
The others, have just focused on the social aspect. Instagram is all about quirky filters; Google’s schizophrenic Picasa Web aka Google+ Photos is all about something depending on which of the three ways you access it (don’t forget it’s Blogger‘s backend too); TwitPic, Yfrog, etc. are all about tweeting photos on Twitter, which Twitter does by themselves now and prefers; 500px, MyShoebox, PhotoBucket, OpenPhoto, and the rest are trying to find their niche amongst the big players. And Microsoft’s Skydrive Photos fits in there too somewhere, mainly for the clueless and complacent.
The nicest thing about Flickr on Twitter is you get more than the short tweet (126 characters once the Flickr link is factored in) because the integration pulls in the photo, the caption, and the description!!!
Unfortunately your Flickr photos don’t show-up in the Twitter photo-stream, like they do if shared via Twitter, TwitPic, etc.
So, it looks pretty much like Flickr is going to become my photo-tweeting service of choice – replacing TwitPic; but I’ll still edit up the photos using Aviary‘s amazing full-featured editor before posting them.
Cross-posted on 2FatDads
Schultzter 