sitting at my table
I didn’t see this news until now, but I have a few thoughts on Yahoo!’s decision to shut down the Yahoo! Photos service and migrate users to Flickr. The TechCrunch post has an interesting line graph charting the relative traffic of the two sites. Yahoo! Photos has been on a downward trend, while Flickr’s traffic has grown, exceeding Y!P in March. While I would agree that Flickr is certainly a more pleasant and interesting service, I wonder if this difference in traffic has more to do with the affordances of Flickr, rather than raw traffic. Flickr is designed as a social, public-facing site. Bloggers can use the site to host photos, and users are encouraged to explore friends’ and strangers’ photos through tags, search, and “interestingness.” In contrast, Y!P seems to be largely designed to host personal, not public, photos. The article says Y!P has over two billion hosted photos, while Flickr has about 500 million. The relative ages of the sites could account for this, but I think the kinds of traffic are different as well. If I were, for example, a parent who primarily wanted to share photos of children and daily life, I’m not sure Flickr would be an appropriate solution for me. While Flickr is not MySpace, the purpose of Flickr seems to be public identity construction, whether you’re a serious amateur photographer, a wannabe a-list blogger, or a hipster.
I’ve talked about this in school, but I don’t think I’ve shared this idea here. I think Web 2.0 applications depend on particular kinds of cultural capital for their functioning. In particular, tagging sites like Flickr and del.icio.us require the user to understand how tagging works if photos or links to be discoverable. One only needs to look at the misapplication of tags on YouTube to see how a lack of user knowledge can break a system. (I’m not saying YouTube is unsuccessful, but I think the tag system is useless.) I wonder how proficient the n00bs from Y!P will be in tagging, or if misapplied tags will pollute the folksonomy. Moreover, I do think knowing how to use the privacy settings (setting photos Friends-only for example) requires a cultural capital not all users are aware of and may only learn after a distasteful experience.
It should be interesting to see how this transition plays out. I don’t imagine that Y!P users are the kind of sophisticated Web users who will blog their experiences with the transition, but watching a qualitative sense of “tag quality” might reveal an awkward transition from Y!P.
