Flickr’s new mobile app

Flickr’s new mobile app for iOS is pretty neat. Though i would say a tad bit late. However, good to see Yahoo putting the focus where it should have been  a few years ago.

Flickr had the photography community one can only dream of, but they all petered out. Frustrated. Dejected - as Flickr remained directionless for a while.

Add to it the lack of a decent mobile app, and Flickr failed to onboard a whole new generation of  mobile camera happy shutterbugs who upload pictures on the go.

The new iOS app addresses that problem. The UI is neat and intuitive, and gives easy access to almost all the features on the home screen. The camera function is decent and does it job sans any edit capabilities. Would be good to see if Flickr adds some editing capabilities to this app. However, in terms of it’s overall approach I found the new iOS app to be more closer to 500px than to Instagram - at least in terms of UI.

The sad part is that in terms of content I would have to say 500px has better photographs these days than Flickr. One view through the ” interesting” section and I would say 500px has more “wow” images than the Flickr gallery. Add to it the fact that 500px has an inbuilt marketplace and allows photographers to monetize right from their profiles and there is an incentive that’s hard to ignore.

Next move Yahoo? Filters ? In built  e-commerce ?

After ages, Yahoo surprises with an awesome product

Yes, it may not win the browser wars, but then who thought Chrome would be the top dog in just four years.

Fact is, with Axis, Yahoo has really got something which is quite different from other browsers  from an experience point of view, and the search experience is visually quite appealing.

Yes no more lines of blue links….all you get to see are a series of box images and you can decide where you want to click on….pretty neat…pretty unique.

It really builds heavily on the safari webkit rendering engine and creates a UI which I found quite refreshing. On my Mac, it gave me a test run which made me want to play with it for a while. And unlike other browsers which take out half of your screen on the top, the search bar on the Axis sits ubiquitously at the bottom left of the screen. A small box, and a much easier place from a UI perspective to type a few words and get results, without changing windows. The beauty is since the  search window glides up from the bottom of the screen, you can keep on the same window and keep searching through rows of visual search windows with images with no scroll up/down. It just keeps scrolling sideways. Neat.

But it’s not the desktop where the Axis can change the game. Mobile search as of today is horribly clunky. As a mobile browser Axis, is far more easier to handle. On a mobile interface it is nicely packaged, quite intuitive and gives a much better experience, especially for a generation of touch smartphones. 

Now it’s left to the Yahoo search algorithms. Can they at least compete with Google and Bing ? If they can, then this browser will stay in the game and it will force the others to change and come up with something similar. It will be a lynchpin.

Irrespective of what happens, I am a very much about experience when it comes to digital products. And this one rocked me on first attempt. 

For the first time, after Google rolled out the first search product, I came across a browser which is rendering search experience in a radically different form from an experience and look and feel perspective. All the rest have been me too’s. 

Well done Yahoo. Between law suits, bad press, fired CEO, resume gate, one more fired CEO, activist shareholders and the ensuing soap opera it must have been hard to concentrate on new products, but this time around its a good one. 

You may not win, cos its late, but you have given a product which has the ability to even start a fight. 
Yahoo didn’t lose because Google out-competed them on search. They lost because they didn’t really care about search – indeed, they outsourced algorithmic search to Alta Vista, Inktomi and then Google itself. The leading portals back in circa 2000 (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos etc) desperately wanted to keep keep users on their site – the buzzword was “stickiness” – but Google knew better and focused on getting users off of Google to other places on the web. Yahoo became just another place to read celebrity gossip and use generic web services.
Chris Dixon