Update April 11th: The “We Say NO to Videos on Flickr” group now has 26,000+ members
Flickr has recently introduced their video service with the slogan, “It’s like a photo, but it moves! Woo hoo!”. My reaction was that what took them so long? They already had the entire infrastructure in place, and if it worked for pictures, it could work for videos too. Although this morning I received a surprising invitation in my flickr mailbox to a flickr group with the title of “We Say NO to Videos on Flickr” !!! The group currently has more than 9600 members.
Seems like there is a mixed reaction coming from the Flickr community regarding the newly introduced video service. Traditionally photographers do not perceive video to be as sophisticated as photographs, and apparently some people within the flickr community view the video services as a threat to the artistic merit of what once was a photo sharing service. Some are concerned that flickr will be reduced to the level of YouTube or it would be a gateway to the porn content.
No doubt there are so many amazing photographs posted on the flickr that to me they have quite high artistic value. The question is: was it because the quality of the flickr community or the medium in which they have expressing themselves through? Perhaps it is the combination of both, but it would be interesting to see how a so called more sophisticated community than YouTube’s would express itself through videos and pictures combined.
[tags]flickr, social media, photograph, video[/tags]