Have fallen back into Flickr this week. I guess it’s an outlet for my snot-brain to get involved in something creative while I’m too ill to write much, even if getting involved simply means looking at other people’s pictures or uploading my old ones of Berlin. I tried to finally watch S2 of The Walking Dead, but I keep dropping off and then spoilering myself by waking up at the end of an episode. So, the laptop wins over the tv for now. For all that I love Pinterest, Flickr has an edge in terms of showcasing images people have actually created, vs passive pinning, and it’s been fun to hang out there again.
Here’s a collection of some of my recent favourites. Lots of sun and beaches, fancy that.
1. ., 2. Untitled, 3. Nā Mokulua, 4. Lemons & Garage Doors, 5. sweethearts just before the plunge, 6. Burst, 7. Space Sindy, 8. Stewy, 20 SIGNED John Cooper Clarke silkscreen, 9. grand central.
Flickr is where I used to live before Twitter, before Facebook and even before Myspace, and it feels out of place next to those modern belles of the ball. Kinda like that old friend you’ve known since you were 14, the one with no social skills and a terrible haircut, the girl you still love but don’t invite to parties for fear of what she might say.
I wish it had more finesse, options to set up wider filters than ‘friends’, ‘family’ and ‘contacts’- this is one place where the circles which infuriate me on Facebook and G+ could make sense. In many cases I’d rather subscribe to select parts of someone’s stream than their entire output. For example, I might choose to see everything a user tags with ‘film’, ‘beach’ or ‘graffiti’, but skip the photos of their children and their motorbikes.
I like the way casual snapshots sit alongside pro photography, and prefer it to the poncy show-off slickness of 5oopx, it’s just that there are better ways of handling that variety of content and every other social site since manages it better.
The Tumblr interface almost does what I want, in terms of sharing images and following other people’s streams – but it’s too heavy with teens and Manga porn gifs to work as a Flickr replacement. Nowt wrong with teens and Manga porn gifs – man, if Tumblr had been around when I was an adolescent I would have been obsessed with it, and my Plath-Gatsby-JMascis-Kerouac-Nirvana-Suede-badpoetry solipsism would have been a wonder to behold – it’s just not what I’m looking for right now.
C’mon Yahoo, please put some money and some new life into the site, I fail to see what else you have going for you as a company right now.
UPDATE – have just been sent this damning, detailed, depressing article on exactly How Yahoo killed Flickr. Maybe it really is too late?
