Yahoo! Taking On Instagram With Flickr
Yahoo announced some new changes to Flickr with version 3.0 for iOS and Android, and they seem to be aimed at competing with the wildly popular Instagram photo sharing service with a number of filters, advanced editing, intelligent search, and plenty of social elements.
There are fourteen different live photo filters you can employ even before you snap a picture, and there are plenty of editing tools beyond that. The live filters work on up to 30 seconds of video, too.
Users get Flickr’s 1TB of storage with an AutoSync feature that backs up your photos as soon as you take them (in their original quality), and you can search your own photo database with terms such as a month and year or a place, and the engine will locate pertinent photos intelligently. You can also easily share batches of photos from the app to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.
It only makes sense that Yahoo would wade into the waters currently owned by Instagram. Flickr has around for a long time and is a mature platform, and it’s always been somewhat social. Further, it’s a widely-known brand with a strong user base. All Yahoo needed was some solid app features that would entice users, and poof--you have yourself a reasonable competitor to Instagram.
Yahoo’s changes under CEO Marissa Mayer have sometimes been rather clunky (eg, email) and seemingly farfetched (eg, the video service), but Flickr 3.0 seems like it may be a winner. Whether or not Yahoo can take a chunk of Instagram’s users remains to be seen, though.
There are fourteen different live photo filters you can employ even before you snap a picture, and there are plenty of editing tools beyond that. The live filters work on up to 30 seconds of video, too.
Users get Flickr’s 1TB of storage with an AutoSync feature that backs up your photos as soon as you take them (in their original quality), and you can search your own photo database with terms such as a month and year or a place, and the engine will locate pertinent photos intelligently. You can also easily share batches of photos from the app to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.
It only makes sense that Yahoo would wade into the waters currently owned by Instagram. Flickr has around for a long time and is a mature platform, and it’s always been somewhat social. Further, it’s a widely-known brand with a strong user base. All Yahoo needed was some solid app features that would entice users, and poof--you have yourself a reasonable competitor to Instagram.
Yahoo’s changes under CEO Marissa Mayer have sometimes been rather clunky (eg, email) and seemingly farfetched (eg, the video service), but Flickr 3.0 seems like it may be a winner. Whether or not Yahoo can take a chunk of Instagram’s users remains to be seen, though.
