But I think if anyone could pull off a social experience with video, it would be the flickr team. Flickr is a social experience and so far, no one, no one has pulled off anything worth using.

Argo: I agree, you brought up just about every cost/technology reason why they haven’t or why lesser companies may sit around and say ‘no’. But that’s also the point of my post. That line of thinking is thinking about the business first and not about serving user needs and behaviors. (other than the photographers you mentioned ) Only Flickr really knows if its a good move or not for them, but in general the post is about companies thinking outside their own proverbial box so-to-speak.

The same thing could be said of the iPod. Who would have thought two years ago that Apple would be selling an iPod with video. The scenes too small. Who would pay for that? But they did it anyway because they saw the market heading that way. They morphed a “music-playing device” into a “music+photos playing device” to a “total media” device with music, photos, and video.

Great thoughts!

Well, the technology to handle each is different. A photo (usually a jpg) gets downloaded to your cache. Usually video sites stream the content, don’t let you download it. Also, with photos, it’s a bit easier to manipulate them: create thumbnails, different sizes, reduce quality, rotate, crop, etc. It’s a bit more limited what you can do with video edition online.

Also, while photos are reduced to 3 main types: png, jpg, gif (and i think flickr lets you upload jpg and gif only, right?), while video can be generated in so many different formats: avi, mov, divx, wmv, mp4, mpeg, etc. And I’m not sure, but I guess some cameras might generate their own type of video, or maybe their own version of a format.

Though they might have the infrastructure, you have to consider that the bandwith increase would be enourmous. A really big photo can be like what? 1, 2 megas? make it bigger, but flickr resizes it, and displays by default a smaller version (and gives you the option to see all sizes). So, the default size of a photo is what? 300kb? Video is usually a lot bigger. An if you’d like to share it, or keep in flickr, you’d like to keep its quality right? if flickr lets you upload, but to stream it, it gets converted, compressed, and loses quality, you wouldn’t like that.

Also, keep into account the way they handle content. They ask you to tag your photos. Tagging an image is easy, you can describe it with words. Videos, for being a sequence of images, get harder to tag, and less precise. While you could tag a photo as “green” or “beautiful”, refering to the main subject of it, with a video gets much difficult: “green”, but where (when actually, where in the timeline).

Another thing, which I love: the flickr api. What if suddenly they mixed the photo content with videos, wouldn’t the api break? you have an application that gets your content and display it in a certain way (say in flash), then suddenly a video comes, your app. can’t handle that. Either they’d give tools to filter between videos and photos, or the developers using the api would need to update the code.

My personal opinion is that there’s also more people creating good quality photos than there’s people creating good quality video. Also, while all photo cameras take photos, not all of them take video. Also, not everybody is sharing photos with the family or friends, There’s flickr users like artists or fashion photographers who just don’t care about video. My point is, while in flickr everybody is interested in photography, not everybody is interesting in video. So it’s not a matter of just keep adding services if they are not getting used completelly.

They probably have the infrastructure, but I’d say they shouldn’t mix photos with video. Why not just make a sister site that has the same concept of flickr, but handles video only? That’s be much better, and probably at some point yahoo could do it, or buy some of the services that are getting popular in that area.

http://news.com.com/Shedding+light+on+Flickr/2100-1025_3-5997943.html?tag=st.txt.caro

If they offer video hosting/posting they might have people using it for VLOGing and other uses. Not sure if that is a bad thing, but I could see some problems.

On the flip side, if they did host videos I would surely use it a decent amount.