I’m still using Flickr, despite my serious reservations about the new design, which I think is quite frankly awful. I’m not complaining about change for the sake of it, the new Flickr landing page for signed in accounts is full of too much noise and only offers the justified view. Despite performance improvements, large images and infinite style scrolling are bandiwidth and RAM hogs.
However Flickr is still a good place for storing images and groups are pretty much the same as they ever were, with a variety of views available. The way groups work should be the norm, not the exception. However Flickr, despite the howls of protest from users, have steadfastly refused to allow people to customise their views on the landing page, or when they explore. Why? I have no idea but I’m going to speculate that it’s part of a longer term plan to intergrate with Tumblr, because the idea that they’re annoying so many users just to implement adverts holds little water, if they haven’t got website designers who can incorporate adverts into different views, they should hire some who can. I believe their staff are more than capable of serving adverts in different views.
So my guess is that there is going to be some intergration with Tumblr. Coincidentally enough Tumblr’s homepage has had a revamp this week and one that, according to Mashable’s Samantha Murphy is : “a photo-rich design very reminiscent of its new sister site Flickr”
As I said I’m speculating, but taking the speculation further, groups are still good in terms of usability. Groups would be far more difficult to engage with Tumblr intergration, therefore there’s no need to force infinite scrolling and justified images on groups if the goal is Tumblr intergration.
However exploring Flickr could be far more easily intergrated to also explore Tumblr and there you would want consistency. Photostreams are a bit different but yes, intergration with Tumblr could happen there too and the same with the landing page where it may be an aim to combine Flickr and Tumblr accounts so that you’d see Tumblr and Flickr comments and images.
As I keep saying, this is pure speculation, but speculation is really all you can do when Flickr so steadfastly refuse to give users the customisation options that once existed and if they were available today, would deal with a lot of the gripes on the Flickr forums.
Whether I’m right or wrong only time will tell, but there must be more to the Flickr revamp than meets the eye, no company would want to annoy their customers like this just to make the site look jazzier for some.