Why Flickr and not Fotolog?

At the IA Summit I got to participate on a Web 2.0 panel with Brandon Schauer, Michal Migurski and Dan Brown. It was a fun panel where we openly disagreed about the impact of Web 2.0 on IA and related disciplines. (Brandon also put together a really hot deck that framed the conversation well).

Toward the end of the panel Brandon showed this slide that compared features of various photo-publishing sites:

I reviewed the slides the night before the panel and got stuck on this image. Something about it felt wrong. It's like looking through Web 2.0 goggles. (The words I used to describe it during the panel were "post-hoc sense-making of web 2.0.")

Anyway, the first question that bubbled into my mind when I saw it was "what about Fotolog?" Fotolog had many of the same features as the early Flickr (in fact, its line would be almost identical to Flickr). It preceded Flickr, at 3 million members it's as popular as Flickr [1], and it had some of the same early buzz.

More than Snapfish, Shutterfly or EasyShare, Fotolog was a peer of Flickr. But it was never acclaimed in the same way. If Flickr is an exemplar of Web 2.0, then comparing Flickr and Fotolog should tell us something interesting about Web 2.0 (and I think it does).

When I brought this up in the panel, Christian Crumlish talked about how Fotolog used to be popular with Well users. When Fotolog started to have problems (of the "having a massage" variety), Well users began switching to Flickr.

The Flickr team also tweaked their product to accommodate early user requests, like those from Well users. (Mike Migurski mentioned that Flickr would release as many as 10 updates in a day.) That resulted in well-deserved buzz, and a lot of switching. Fotolog today is basically the same as Fotolog from 2004.

There are probably many other reasons for Flickr's success and Fotolog's apparent stagnation. But the ones illustrated here--agile development and cultivating relationships with influential users--seem more likely candidates for Flickr's sucess than sharing, printing or the other criteria in the above graph. There's certainly a virtuous cycle involved in responding quickly to the people who can send links, attention and other users your way. [2,3]

During the panel Q & A, John Zapolski asked: "what's wrong with appealling to alpha geeks?" Maybe the really crucial lesson of Web 2.0 is that you should do whatever your alpha geeks [4] think is cool. And as John suggests by his question, there's nothing wrong with that (or, in fact, new about that).

But it certainly takes some of the wind out of this populist "architecture of participation" stuff.

1. According to Newsweek, Flickr has 2.5 million users

2. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but it sure can't hurt to have one of the guys who runs the world's most popular blog as an advisor, especially when said blog mentions your site over 300 times in two years. (In comparison, Fotolog gets four mentions). To be fair, a lot of these mentions are due to the remarkable photo contributions of Flickr users.

3. I wonder: is the perception of Fotolog as an also-ran photo sharing site because of its large Latin American user community? Flickr is more polished in just about every way, but Fotolog has more users.

4. Alpha geeks here being a general term for influential users (cf. mavens, salesmen, etc.)