So if we extrapolate wildly from this, we could say Flickr peaked in 2008. Tech blogs and external traffic meters seem to agree.

And that’s no fun. Because none of my friends use the other photo-centered semi-public sites. And Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter all make photos more private by default, or are much less searchable.

Unless that changes, when Flickr dies, so will the photo commons.

Nick Douglas

We’re all pretty much familiar with the story of Bindermichi’s account being accidentally deleted on Flickr after he complained about his photos being stolen and re-posted to another person’s account. We can all agree that this pretty much sucks and should not happen like this. I do feel sorry for the poor Flickr staff member who pressed the button – his/her life probably wasn’t very nice for some time after that happened¹ and it seems like the Flickr staff worked hard and managed to restore the whole account again. Everything is peachy now, right?

Well, turns out, there is the CEO of some photo hosting service that could in some way be considered Flickr’s competition – Don MacAskill from SmugMug. Smugly enough he did write a rather smug blog post about this kind of thing on their official company blog. This is not unusual behaviour for Don, and it triggered former Flickr staff member Kevin Collins to write a blog post calling out Don MacAskill on the way he communicates about Flickr.

Now I don’t know Kevin or Don,² but from how I experienced Flickr – especially how their staff reacted in stressful situations,³ and how certain vocal parts of the Flickr and web communities react to stories like that, I won’t make any secret about where my sympathies are. I do make a conscious effort to follow current and past Flickr people on Twitter and read their blogs, as very often they are rather insightful and smart. And I have no doubts whatsoever that in most cases, their decision regarding account and group deletions are and have been well-thought-out and reasonable.

And Don? Well… I guess if you have “Thomas Hawk” on your side, then there’s nothing much left to be said.

1. Yeah, I do speak from experience…
2. I do know Mirco, though, but that’s besides the point.
3. And situations where I many many people were unhappy with them.

Now that’s just awesome and actually very pretty: a visualization of ALL flickr shapefiles. [via]

Nice, the new Flickr layout, that I have been allowed to test-drive as beta-tester for a while, is now open for everybody.

"Yahoo! Updates platform" just sounds nasty.

Really pretty visualization of streets.

"With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. Flickr helped pioneer “Web 2.0″, and personal data ownership is a key piece of that vision. Just because the wider public hasn’t caught on yet to all the nuances around data access, data privacy, data ownership, and data fidelity, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be failing to deliver a quality product."

Heather Powazek Champ is leaving Flickr.

Nice tool to see the favorite pictures of your contacts on Flickr. It's fun to find new and interesting photographs this way.