An utterly banal image of a Post-It we uploaded to various social sites yesterday for testing purposes. 
Nobody loves Yahoo. But people do love some of its parts, most notably Flickr, the photo sharing site that once seemed poised to take on the world, at least until it was acquired by Yahoo, which largely squandered its potential. There was a point in time when Flickr could have been Instagram, or even Facebook. Instead it joined the ranks of Friendster and MySpace and other sites that also could have been, but never quite were.
Despite that, Flickr is still incredibly beloved — so much so that it represents a huge opportunity for Yahoo’s newest CEO. In short, who cares about the greater Yahoo whole? The real question is, Can Marissa Mayer save Flickr, the one Yahoo property with legitimate user affinity?
Case in point: Sean Bonner published a single-serving site called Dear Marissa Mayer just after Mayer’s Yahoo appointment was announced. It’s a straightforward appeal to the new Yahoo CEO to “Please Make Flickr Awesome Again.” The site’s #dearmarissamayer hashtag was all over the place. Bonner didn’t identify what would make Flickr awesome, or even better than it is today. But I will: Flickr needs engagement.
Flickr used to be the world’s best photo-sharing service because it was the most likely place for people to interact with your pictures. Yet for myriad reasons — from missing the boat on mobile and real-time, to poor sign-up and sign-in experiences, to social problems — Flickr just isn’t as engaging as it once was. I suspect that’s what so many people tweeting #dearmarissamayer would like to see: engagement. When it comes to social, engagement is the killer feature.
No matter what kind of upgrades its team rolls out, Flickr can’t be “awesome again” as long as it’s a ghost town. It’s not that Flickr needs more features, per se. It’s not going to take off thanks to a great lightbox, or brilliantly displayed EXIF data, or amazing slideshow features. Those things are nice. But what makes it awesome is people.
We hunger for interaction online — otherwise why share at all? We want those favorites and comments and jokes and other human moments. We want to feel a part of something. We want to be less lonely, less bored, and less isolated as we sit silently staring into flickering screens all day. We want someone to like us, to poke us, to comment on us and, in some small way, validate our existence via software and the connective tissue of the internet.
That’s what Flickr used to do, and that I suspect people desire from it again.
I wanted to test out this notion. So at 3 p.m. on Tuesday I took a photo of a sticky on my desk and uploaded it to several photo-sharing services — Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Path (and you can see it at the top of this article). And just for kicks, I also uploaded it to MlkShk as an afterthought, almost a half hour after all the other platforms. MlkShk is a site with only about 20,000 users, but it’s a very engaged community. These are the results of my extremely, exceptionally, highly unscientific survey after one hour on each site, ranked in terms of interactions*.
Twitter: 45 up votes (13,835 contacts)
Facebook: 35 up votes (2261 contacts)
Instagram: 19 up votes (1465 contacts)
MlkShk: 7 likes (337 contacts)
Google+ 6 up votes (14,468 contacts)
Flickr: 4 up votes (415 contacts)
Path: 2 up votes (105 contacts)
By the next morning Twitter was at 66, Facebook at 51, Instagram at 57, MlkShk at 46, Google+ at 19, and Path stalled out at 2. And Flickr, where it landed on the site’s “Explore” page that highlights the most interesting photos of the day? 23. Perhaps more damning than the poor showing in terms of up votes was how ignored it was in real-time. It was only even viewed a total of five times on Flickr in that first hour.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/gadgetlab_071812_flickrengage/
No comments:
Post a Comment