Pinterest killing Flickr
by AxelS • February 8, 2012 • AppsWorld, Blog, Presence development, Technology • 13 Comments
Pinterest is popping up all over the place. Is it just noise of some early adopter freaks? No it is not.
Pinterest is a super fast growing content sharing platform that competes with Flickr, Picasa and the likes. Now recently Pinterest is coming very close to the traffic rank level of Flickr and as Pinterest was growing Flickr's traffic is declining.
Here is what makes Pinterest so strong and moves it into a position that will outperform the 800 pound gorilla – Flickr
1) Pinterest is social from the get go
Flickr is simply a photo sharing platform that never developed any further. You can't even like a photo. Comments is the best you can do. In contrast on Pinterest you have a decent vanity URL see a persons profile, and you can follow selected or all so called "boards" – you may call it sets, groups of content etc. Obviously you can like images, comment on them and more
2) Pinterest is a community
As you follow users on Pinterest you build a sense of community. You see what's new and coming and you see it right in your list of users you follow. All this is either not possible or too complicated in Flickr.
3) Pinterest Re-pin feature
One of the other killer features is repining photos. This is where the rubber meets the road. It is super easy to basically pin whatever you liked and add it to your own board. You may create a super interesting collection of things or just because you liked one thing. What about IP (Intellectual Property)? If this is your concern, don't go there for the other billion this is not an issue because we are here to share not to own. Obviously giving credits is a must and it is actually automatic on Pinterest as soon as you repin an image.
4) A social time line
Social is probably the one major difference over all. And as such Pinterest has a social timeline sharing what I liked, uploaded, re-pinned and so forth. Again it becomes a community and not just a pixel graveyard.
5) Shared Contribution
And again – social. Pinterest offeres the ability that others can actually contribute to a board. For instance if you use Pinterest as a business you may want your entire team contribute. Or if you have a fan club you want the whole club be able to contribute. Needless to say that all this is light years ahead of Flickr and it is hard to imagine that a company like Yahoo that has just no social DNA will ever be able to catch up.
6) Following, Linkes, Social Integration
Pinterest supports the key engagement features with buttons and links to build a following similar to Twitter. And as people continue to upload photos, images, screenshots, box shots you create a social engagement for both you personal friends or your business friends (I purposely use the term business friends instead of "target audience".
Obviously you find all the traditional photo sharing stuff including use of tags inside Pinterest. When I googled "tips for Pinterest" today – I got 60 Million findings. Not bad for a startup. RIP Flickr.
There is no doubt in my mind that Flickr will be half of Pinterest in less than 12 month. Even if Yahoo is investing big time to catch up – it will only be catch up and Pinterest will continue to innovate and lead – simply because of its social foundation. And that social foundation is not just a set of engineering hours but a mind set.
Axel
That is cool!, I never really liked flickr anyway- :)
I agree with your analysis Axel
Pinterest has drawn my interest , it is simple to use , with shared boards you can build knowledge bases. The strength lies in a first class interface and ease of pinning and the shared experience
http://pinterest.com/stevenhealey/
wouldn't it make more sense to replace Pinterest in this article with Instagram? Just a thought…
IMO and Personally, I don't think Flickr will go away. I think it provides a solid place to share photos with friends and not everyone and his brother. It provides better mechanism for protect privacy and better level of control with who that gets shared with and how people can download or reuse pictures. For the early adopters this won't matter since they are all over everywhere, but for the more conservative late adopters and businesses this is still a very real concern. In the B2B space and non tech software community, who are not the "open" co-create type community yet, they continue to have reservations.
Wendy
xeeme.com/wendysoucie
Most of the photography I find on Pinterest was originally posted to Flickr. What's frustrating is that Flikr doesn't usually include attribution, and I'm not talking about people posting the work of others without giving credit. I'm talking about people posting their OWN photography and not telling anyone their names or linking to a blog, website or social profile.
If only apples were round and orange, you'd be spot on.
@Wendy – good point I always forget about those demographics *LOL*. And I absolutely agree, Flickr will not go away but be overshadowed by Pinterest. The net native generation posts on average 500 times and views 1,000 times as much as the post 35' generation. So yes there is a niche for Flickr – but just a small niche.
I am somewhere between Axel and Wendy on this one.
Yes the social side of Pinterest is good and will continue to drive its growth rapidly. It is quicker, easier and more fun to use than flickr.
BUT, as an on-line storage archive for large numbers of photos, I believe flickr is better suited. I certainly will not put all my photos from flckr onto Pinterest.
flickr is better suited to arranging large numbers of photos by category in sets and preserving some degree of ownership for those that require it.
Pinterest will certainly draw many early adopters away from flickr as Wendy predicts, but I do not think it will lead to flickr's collapse.
I would bet that enough people will continue to support both, with varying degrees of preference, to allow flickr to survive.
It will be interesting to see how this develops and what will be the next new platform after Pinterest.
It seems very strange to compare Pinterest with Flickr. Surely they serve completely different purposes. Shouldn't you be comparing Pinterest with Delicious and the like?
Both Pinterest and Flickr are photo sharing sites. But Pinterest offers more and more social. To add Delicious into the mix is an interesting though though – thank you.
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Personally I think Pinterest and Flickr serve two completely separate audiences. With Flickr you are sharing high quality photos that others will like. With Pinterest, you are sharing a personal side of you in images, you are showing people the things you like, that make you happy.
Good post, and nicely backed up with the Google Trends data.
I think Pinterest is onto something important. I see it as a manifestation of our desire to visualize. But I tend to agree with some of the other commenters, Flickr is not going away anytime soon. There are a few reasons, as I see it.
First, Flickr will evolve to become more of a niche site, catering to photography professionals and hobbyists as well as casual photographers. That's still a huge market.
Another point is that Pinterest is already being taken over by brands, so users are less likely to visit as content quality is degraded by spammers. That's a huge issue for Pinterest to face, but has virtually no impact on Flickr.
Third point is that Flikr's API has spawned plugins and apps that Pinterest has yet to offer. Just check out the number of Flickr plugins for WordPress for example. So yes, Pinterest is the next big thing, but it has a ways to go before putting the final nail in Flickr's coffin.
http://xeeme.com/RogerHarris