I tend to agree with you: Flickr is a webcommunity that has to evolve or remain niche/disappear. It is currently half way through and there is a need to rejuvenate their innovation scheme.

They got acquired by Yahoo because of their tagging technology which is a brilliant asset in light of contextual search (or so called search 3.0) but what else. Geotagging is pretty cool too and loads of mash up have done great thing with the Flickr feeds… Yet there should be more.

Regarding your point on contacts though, I disagree. I appreciate that through Flickr I can grant access to different level of “service”. In Facebook, I do have several groups, but cannot do anything with it. I cannot restrict my profile access to the various groups…

Final point, to conquer with your point about Flickr not being mainsteam, I was recently informed that the number one photo sharing site was not flickr, picasa or kodak gallery… It’s hotmail. People still share more photos through emails than through dedicated website.

Thanx for answering this in person. It is really appreciated.

On the Greasymonkey script: I run Safari so this is not an option for me (nor is it for all the people running Opera/IE/Camino/Chrome/etc).

I got 2 comments on your Upcoming/Flickr reply.

First, I agree that we don’t need to give everyone a Upcoming widget but I think there are ways to do this which are non obtrusive to non-Upcoming users. Why can’t I say somewhere in the Flickr backend that this is my Upcoming account, that’s my Twitter account, and my Dopplr account is over there…?

Secondly I find it odd that you do think it is “ok” to give a nice interface on the Upcoming side of things. Why not also give a Zooomr integration there, or a Photobucket? It is the same argument you just made.

In the end my point is though that Yahoo/Flickr has always been an exceptional leader with the introduction and promotion of machine tags, but they have failed (in my eyes) to make it so easy that it transcends the geek-realm.

There is a greasemonkey script that does more or less what you want.

But I’m not sure it makes any sense to have an Upcoming.org widget for every Flickr user — why not Dopplr or Eventful or anything else. Our idea was always to improve the tagging interface on the Upcoming side instead — if you’re looking at an event, you should be able to pop open a widget that shows the photos taken around the same time on Flickr. There are a few non-obvious hurdles there so it’s been on the back burner for ages.