I am deeply devoted to flickr.  It is a photo sharing site that functions primarily (to me) as external storage for my images, which I can categorize and group to my heart’s content.

A wonderful secondary aspect is that I have made new friends and strengthened existing friendships through its use. The site is full of playful, creative, engaging people. It’s the only website (apart from beckyhaycox.com, which belongs to me)  that I entrust with my content. I do not create nor store anything on any other site (such as twitter or Facebook) that I really care about owning or keeping. But that can of worms will be opened in a later post.

My main frustration with flickr isn’t even flickr’s fault — it’s my own stubborn (and no doubt annoying) proselytizing about flickr to those still uninitiated. I have tried so hard to get my close family members to join in the fun to no avail. I find it a simple interface to figure out, but some don’t think so. And my sister A will have nothing (and I mean nothing) to do with strangers on the internet. I try to tell her that you can customize flickr so that you would never have to interact with anyone, but she doesn’t buy it. Flickr is so flexible that it looks like there are endless and confusing options to configure. This isn’t true, of course. At this point she and I both are tired of the sound of my pleas. Man, I just keep dragging these reluctant horses to the water and they just won’t drink! Free will, bah!

I do understand the appeal of the tools that Facebook has adopted for photos, and why people would want to post their images there. Friend-tagging is fun and I find myself glancing through friends’ photo albums quite often. However, I hate the sloppy interface and photos look kind of compressed and muddy (my opinion.) And flickr has much more sophisticated download, comment, and viewing controls. At this point, if feels  Facebook is for snapshots and flickr is for photographs. Kind of.

Ariel Stallings also thinks that flickr should adopt some of Facebook’s networking tools:

[flickr is] still the best place for me to publicly share photos. But when it comes to social photos? Pictures of people? Pictures of friends? Facebook has surpassed it, and that makes me sad.

That makes me sad, too. I hate the fact that my flickr usage, along with that of most of my friends and family, has fallen off. I don’t want flickr to become a full-on social network; flickr does what I want it to do, and with a clean and simple interface. But I fear that, unless flickr can adopt some of these advanced tagging/sharing options, people will stop using it completely and flickr will disappear.

I encourage flickr users to post links to their photos and photostreams to Facebook from flickr. At least, the photos that are more than snapshots. I miss my flickr peeps, and I miss making new flickr friends, and I would mourn if my community went away.

Related articles about the future of flickr:

• Pulling the Flickr sword out of the Yahoo stone
• Where-in I admit my disappointment in Flickr [referenced above]

This is the first in a series about my humble opinions and observations as an enduser, about social networking and online communities in general. This is prompted by the recent controversites surrounding Facebook. I invite everyone to write about their own opinions and observations. I think we’re at a real crossroads with this technology, and our voices should be heard. We have a chance to make a change!