Someone at flickr should be fired today

As much as I enjoy my flickr community experience, I have to say that I have never seen a large-scale commercial web service that is so poorly deployed. Today, January 2, 2008, I expect everyone will be uploading their holiday photos, and flickr will be under heavy load. In fact, flickr is unusable today. It is so slow that I just close the browser window. I have other things to do rather than stare at a blank screen.

Thing is, if I can anticipate that, it is something that should have been anticipated by flickr as well. With a deep-pockets parent company like Yahoo, there should be no question of performance problems. Instead, they are the rule, not the exception.

I am afraid flickr banks on the fact that it is very hard to leave the service because it is hard to move your photos. It is also hard to leave your established community. So, the poor performance is tolerated by users like me.

There comes a point, however, when things get so bad you just start to question your own sanity in sticking with a service that sucks so bad. Love the new stats feature. The new editing tools are obviously great for people without good software on their local computers. Plenty to like. But when pages won’t load, it kills the rest of the goodness.

flickr recently changed their tagline to “flickr loves you”. I think that is more than a little tongue-in-cheek”. I think some arrogant shit at flickr knows that the service is addictive and therefore they can get away with things few other businesses can. flickr is kind of like the oil companies, or the monopoly hydro company, or the crack dealer on the corner.

I wish flickr would live up to their tagline. I wish someone would stand up for the users and make performance a priority. I am sick of “waiting for www.flickr.com”.

Someone at flickr should be fired today to make way for someone else who knows how to deploy the needed infrastructure to support the service.

Google Phone?

Here’s a compelling analysis of why Google wants to buy the 700mhz spectrum in the US. Keywords: free, open. Two words that are not in the cell phone industry vocabulary. Watch out wireless carriers. You better start thinking about how to change your business models.

Once the company announces the wireless broadband to the nation, it will immediately announce that Google Phone everyone has been talking about. The Google Phone will work specifically with the Google system (kind of like Skype) and will be free of charge. The only fee to the consumer is the cost of buying the phone, which can be done over the Google checkout system from online retailers or at fine brick-and-mortar retailers nationwide.

Ever Google something and get yourself?

Tonight I googled green hornet insect in an attempt to identify a macro photo subject I took today. I flipped Google over to images, clicked on the fourth one in the results and was taken to my own photo set on flickr. That was freaky.

Check it out.

Yahoo is Ruining flickr

Since a recent “upgrade” a couple weeks ago, flickr has been running very poorly. I see in the activity bar on my web browser that flickr is now partially serving images using yahoo image servers. Today they had image cache problems.

When I first joined flickr last year it ran flawlessly. No longer the case.

I hope Yahoo gets this sorted out. They are ruining their acquisition, and people will go elsewhere. For a prosumer site, that is the kiss of death. With the photographers go the photos, and without photos, flickr is nothing but an empty CMS.

The Dawn of the Information Ghetto?

A development in Europe may have some interesting ramifications for search engines. It used to be that the search engine was an amazing thing; a gift to humanity that brought all the world’s online info to your fingertips (some more efficiently than others). Now that search is becoming more commonplace, publishers are starting to wonder if being in the search engines, with their direct links, is really the best thing. Some publishers are recognizing that search engines are stealing revenue. If enough publishers of quality content push back and block the search engines, the content available via free search might just become an information ghetto.

Google has long been regarded as the best of the search engine crowd. Now Google is getting pushed back a bit by the people who provide some of the better content for the Internet. Belgian newspapers have said that it isn’t in their best interest to have their content freely available in search engines, Google in particular. So they went to court. And they won.

Google, the owner of the world’s most-used search engine, must pay $32,500 US a day until it removes all Belgian news content, the Brussels Court of First Instance ruled Tuesday. There’s “no exception” for Google in copyright law, the court said. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it has already removed the content and will appeal the ruling.

The case may restrict how Internet sites in Europe link to newspaper content. Copiepresse, a group representing French- and German-language newspapers including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, had sued Google for copyright infringement. The journals lose advertising revenue when Google uses snippets of articles and links directly to stories, bypassing ads on their Web sites, said Bruno Vandermeulen, a Brussels-based lawyer at Bird & Bird.

The implication here is that search engine trick is wearing thin. It just isn’t that big of a deal now for people to be in the Google search index. For some publishers with no other means of exposure, you can see the value of the model. But if you put energy into your content, and you are selling it elsewhere, it may NOT be in your best interest for your content to be reachable by one click from a Google search. more and more publishing businesses may come to this same conclusion.

The future may see one or both of two things: 1) a new search engine model where the content provider/publisher is in on the deal and recovering revenue from search engines like Google who profit immensely from being the biggest instance of what is no longer that big of a trick to pull off. 2) the ghettoization of free search, wherein the search engines like Google are eventually pushed off a lot of the really good content, which becomes accessible only by direct access or by clicking through on paid ads on select websites. This is not the same as membership sites, but rather a category of web publishing that is in between. The content is still free, but how you get there is constrained by copyright law.

Google better think hard about how to maintain its market leadership here. Some enterprising search outfit might come along with a model that includes content providers at the party, and leaves Google in the ghetto with desperate publishers with no other model.

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