New York:
In many ways, Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site, represents lost opportunities.
In 2004, Flickr brought photo-sharing on the Web back into vogue when it seemed that pioneers like Shutterfly and Snapfish had stopped innovating. Flickr, bought by Yahoo in 2005, ushered in the Web 2.0 era, but was quickly overtaken in traffic by the likes of YouTube and MySpace.
More recently, Facebook has rocketed past Flickr in photo sharing. Even the Picasa photo service from Google is growing faster, according to comScore.
Still, Flickr continues to draw a community of more than 85 million devotees and photo enthusiasts each month around the world. So today, Yahoo is trying to bump Flickr back into the spotlight by introducing a redesigned primary photo page.
The new page, true to Flickr's heritage, displays photos gorgeously. The service has always stored users' original image files, refusing to compress them. Now Yahoo is further exploiting that advantage by displaying photographs 35 percent larger and offering a separate "lightbox" view, which overlays enlarged photos on a black background. Among the other changes, Yahoo has also improved the navigation controls and rewritten the underlying JavaScript, so pages load faster and users can click through images like they are flipping pages in their family scrapbook.
Most interestingly, Yahoo has highlighted the location information its users often include with their photos. The company says it has 130 million geotagged photos. When users include that data in the photograph they upload to the service -- cellphones do it now automatically -- a map is prominently displayed on the right hand side of the new page, specifying precisely where the photo was taken.
"We always had location information and we always considered it to be important, but we are just now getting around to making that more prominent," said Matthew Rothenberg, head of products at Flickr.
Mr. Rothenberg said the intent was not necessarily to position Flickr as an alternative to other check-in services like Foursquare, but to "tell the entire story" of the photo, and help Flickr integrate better with other location-based and real-time services.
Yahoo is introducing the Flickr redesign in preview mode this afternoon. Have a look -- even if you haven't been to Flickr in a while - and tell us what you think.
In 2004, Flickr brought photo-sharing on the Web back into vogue when it seemed that pioneers like Shutterfly and Snapfish had stopped innovating. Flickr, bought by Yahoo in 2005, ushered in the Web 2.0 era, but was quickly overtaken in traffic by the likes of YouTube and MySpace.
More recently, Facebook has rocketed past Flickr in photo sharing. Even the Picasa photo service from Google is growing faster, according to comScore.
Still, Flickr continues to draw a community of more than 85 million devotees and photo enthusiasts each month around the world. So today, Yahoo is trying to bump Flickr back into the spotlight by introducing a redesigned primary photo page.
The new page, true to Flickr's heritage, displays photos gorgeously. The service has always stored users' original image files, refusing to compress them. Now Yahoo is further exploiting that advantage by displaying photographs 35 percent larger and offering a separate "lightbox" view, which overlays enlarged photos on a black background. Among the other changes, Yahoo has also improved the navigation controls and rewritten the underlying JavaScript, so pages load faster and users can click through images like they are flipping pages in their family scrapbook.
Most interestingly, Yahoo has highlighted the location information its users often include with their photos. The company says it has 130 million geotagged photos. When users include that data in the photograph they upload to the service -- cellphones do it now automatically -- a map is prominently displayed on the right hand side of the new page, specifying precisely where the photo was taken.
"We always had location information and we always considered it to be important, but we are just now getting around to making that more prominent," said Matthew Rothenberg, head of products at Flickr.
Mr. Rothenberg said the intent was not necessarily to position Flickr as an alternative to other check-in services like Foursquare, but to "tell the entire story" of the photo, and help Flickr integrate better with other location-based and real-time services.
Yahoo is introducing the Flickr redesign in preview mode this afternoon. Have a look -- even if you haven't been to Flickr in a while - and tell us what you think.
