You point out that Flickr employees need a reason to go to work in the morning, but aren’t there tons of paying Pro account customers to attend to? I know I’m a happy one.

I think Flickr has done more to create itself as a “VIP”-like club than a more integrated solution. It’s like they’re the “Mac” of the “Mac vs. PC” fan-boy war in regard to photo sharing sites. Die hard fan base but the average person couldn’t really care less and uses what comes to them easiest. I didn’t even know about their partnership with Picnic until reading it here, but now that Facebook has eclipsed Flickr as the largest database of photos, why not make a Flickr Facebook app? I would LOVE to be able to tag my friends in all of my Flickr pics rather than selecting my “favourite” ones and having to re-upload them to Facebook as I am doing right now.

Also, Arrington posted back in the summer that Flickr would be adding video to its bill of services (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/03/reconfirmation-flickr-to-add-video/). If you ask me, once they add that to their game, they’re going to be a surefire knockout!

But watchout for Facebook, their terms of service says they have the right to use any photo uploaded for anything they see fit. But Flickr says you keep all rights and they have no right to any of it. Which is why Flickr apeals so much to photographer who love to keep their own work and make a living from it.

The difficulty is that by all accounts Flickr loses money as a stand-alone business and opportunities for monetization beyond the existing Pro accounts, photo albums, etc. aren’t clear. The user base would almost certainly not tolerate heavy advertising across most pages, so its value is the passionate user base, but those users are most valuable when they complement and drive traffic to other web properties.

So perhaps Flickr’s value *is* greatest when it is part of a larger portfolio of web properties — it could be that Yahoo! is simply the wrong home. Y could probably sell Flickr for a massive premium over the original acquisition price (which I think was $30-$35MM, not $50MM), and I’m sure there would be a long line of suitors. Imagine a Facebook / Flickr combination, for example.

I guess what I meant was having people who were passionate about community and photographs/photographers.

Eh ??? do you remember this ??

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-28-n59.html