Flickr Media

Hello guys! Today we’re going to have a guest blogger on today’s post. Meet our special guest for today, Jasmine. 

 

 

Hey guys, I hope that you’ve enjoyed all of my blog posts thus far. This post pertains to my thoughts on Flickr and some of the findings I discovered while conducting my research and how its related to the Gartner Hype Cycle. As always before we go more in-depth I want to make sure that you guys know what the Gartner Hype Cycle is. The hype cycle is a bell-curved shape graph that identifies the phases/stages that a business goes through. The cycle depicts 5 phases, innovation trigger, the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. The figure below is the 2018 Gartner Hype Cycle.

Like most companies, they have a rise and fall. No different with Flickr over the years. Flickr debut six days after Facebook in 2004 and was seen as a new era of social media and technology. From the start, it was building a community of photo lovers around the world who wanted to share images with other photo lovers, as well as thousands of special interest sub-communities. It was about storytelling. In the first few months after Flickr launched, it received many updates and began creating the features that mainly all social media platforms today. These features include tools like photo-streaming, tags, and a mobile app. “These features didn’t just shape Flickr. They helped reshape the entire web, which was still figuring out how social applications should work. (At the time, Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace were getting a good buzz, but you couldn’t do much with them — Facebook didn’t even add photo-sharing capabilities until October 2005.)” (3) Flickr definitely had reached the peak of inflated expectations at this point, since the technology was so fresh and new.

A year later, Yahoo acquired Flickr for approximately $35 million. Things seem to be going well for Flickr under the new ownership of Yahoo, for the first few years. Flickr continued to get new features and upgrades. Their acquisition later came to an end, in 2008. Flickr was never really the center of Yahoo’s social strategy and focused it’s attention elsewhere, causing Flickr to slowly fall through the cracks. “In 2008, both Fake and Butterfield left Yahoo. (As he departed, Butterfield earned additional fame by writing the best resignation letter of all time.) Flickr continued without them but didn’t exactly flourish — because Yahoo itself wasn’t flourishing. The company knew that it was engaging in an epic battle with Google, but didn’t seem to be able to articulate to anyone, including itself, what that meant for it and its properties. As it burned through CEOs like the world’s unluckiest gambler, Flickr began to fester.” (3) Til this day Flickr has still not gained its light back and is stuck in the trough of disillusionment.

“Failures in the context of work really sting and you want to come up with some narrative around them about why they’re not failures. But if you try to learn from them you can turn losses into successes.”- Butterfield

 

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss Flickr’s UI and IA. What the heck is that you may ask. Trust me I didn’t know what it was either until I read chapter 3 of WordPress SEO Success. Okay, so before we go in-depth let’s discuss these two terms in further detail. UI stands for the User interface. To keep it as simple as possible, the user interface is the design of the website and how the user interacts with it, in this case, Flickr. IA stands for information architecture. Information architecture is the process of strategically identifying how your site can best be constructed with navigation, third-party tools and so on. Now that you know the meaning let’s talk Flickr.

Flickr’s IA is very simplistic and easy to use. Their UI includes common devices such as a search bar, windows, buttons, and other controls. Another tool that Flickr’s IA provides, is the fact that it features pictures on your homepage that you’re most interested in which eliminates the amount of time you might spend searching for pictures to view. I definitely believe that their UI and IA are a great fit for their target audience because it’s simple to use for the more basic camera user but also advanced enough for the professional user. Flickr offers a “Get pro” option for professional users, which offers advanced stats, ad-free browsing, automatic photo uploads, and more.

Are you guys familiar with site mapping? No? Neither was I. So the IA act of designing the sitemap includes identifying web goals, keywords, web traffic, and so on to achieve a completed website. Sitemaps can be simple or more complex, it all depends on what the client is going for. The most important thing to remember when designing a website is that it should be created with SEO in mind. Flickr does a great job at providing an SEO-friendly menu page labels. As a first time visitor on Flickr’s webpage, I had an easy time locating important information like the explore page and my photo album. The goal of your IA should always be to make your webpage easy to navigate and clean. Flickr does just that. Check out this link to see a sitemap that I created for Flickr.

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials. – Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group

https://creately.com/diagram/jn47ooup/qOSLllFUIgsX3R2ITlH9tmqfUCc%3D

Since its launching in 2004, Flickr has acquired over 90 million monthly users. Who are all these people you may wonder? First, let’s dive into their customer demographics. Flickr operates mainly in five countries, USA, UK, Japan, Germany, and France. The majority of Flickr’s users are located in the USA. The average age of their users is between 35-44 years old. Approximately 55% of Flickr’s users are women and the rest consist of men. It’s very common for photo-sharing apps to attract more women. In fact, 17 out of 24 sites have more female than male users. Flickr prides itself on providing a photo-sharing platform to professional photographers to the everyday iPhone snapping user. Although professional photographers use Flickr, the majority of its users are normal intermediate cameraphone users. “Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures or video to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!”

 

 

 

We live in a world where we’re all competing to stay ahead of the competition, rather it’s in our personal or business lives. Flickr is no different. Although Flickr is currently leading the pack as the main free online photo-sharing and hosting service, it’s competitor 500px isn’t too far behind. 500px was created in 2009, 5 years after Flickr. Like Flickr, 500px operates as an online community and marketplace for photographers to share, buy, and sell their photos. 500px is seen as the more higher-ranking tool for professional photographers and people with a keen eye for photographs. Flickr, on the other hand, is geared towards a wider audience, from people who want to post a scenic pic from their morning hike, ranging to more professional-quality pics. 

Promotion plays a major part in deciding which photo-sharing app to choose. While many people choose Flickr, 500px is also employed as a marketing tool for photographers. Due to its high caliber of pics, photographers feel impelled to upload and create their very best work.  These pictures are set off by a unique and sophisticated portfolio design provided by 500px, which makes your work appear more professional. Another cool feature that 500px offers is the ability for members to vote and favorite images. This along with views helps increase the chances of your image landing on the popular page, which in returns increases the likelihood of your photos being seen by potential clients. A feature that Flickr offers that 500px doesn’t, is the ability to create or join groups. This is a great way to gain exposure because being in a group facilitates image sharing and allows you the opportunity to be included in discussions and ask questions. Offering this feature gives Flickr an advantage and could be the deciding factor between choosing which platform to upload your images to.

 

In conclusion, both platforms are great market services but the end result of what you’re hoping to get out of posting your pics depends on which platform you might prefer. If you’re hoping to sell your photographs than 500px might be the best choice but if you’re looking to share or create a virtual photo album than Flickr is for you. See, that’s the beauty of social media, there’s something for everyone! I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. Check out this link: https://youtu.be/xxZnoXU_ICk to see a brief video on a feature Flickr has created to continue to compete with 500px. See ya next time! 

 

Best,

Dani