Geek fads and short-lived enthusiasms -- who should care about them? Once again TechCrunch tells us something is "dead" or "in the dead pool" and we're supposed to chime in -- email is dead, the Internet is dead, now Flicker is dead.
What has this to do with the consumer? The consumer will still go on using Flickr. Not everybody is a photographer; lots more people are viewers or people looking for photos to use on blogs or news stories or whatever. Of course, if the devs themselves don't care about their brainchild enough to remain in the company that bought it, and just sell it like that, well, should we care?
I remember hearing Caterina Fake in Second Life -- there was some kind of news conference with her -- was it at Davos? -- and I remember recalling that her philosophy didn't grab me, and she was an example of yet another start-up having no notion of viability other than selling herself to one of the big companies -- in this case Yahoo. (Remember, for a time there was concern that Flickr wouldn't allow uploads of screenshots from virtual worlds? Then they got over that.) That's always unsettling -- that there isn't this rich ecosystem of various-sized companies, instead, there is Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, perhaps a few others, and then these start-ups that they buy and demolish, or buy and trade among themselves, or buy and incorporate as a department, and then the cycle starts all over again. Even something fairly big (like Motorola) gets bought out by Google!
Why is Flickr "dead"? Well, because Mike Arrington says so? He was annoyed that if he stopped paying the premium price, he couldn't get his pictures back from Flickr -- he would have to pay up to access them again. That seemed eminently reasonable -- especially because he would undoubtedly have originals already on his hard drive or camera phone memory. Few people would have a unique copy of a photo only on Flickr -- it's a storage system but the copies have to come from somewhere. But he griped about it, and there was a certain zeitgeist where others were griping about how they didn't feel there was "innovation" lately, or that the premium didn't offer much extra. Everyone -- that is in the geek set -- began to say that Instagram would overtake Flickr.
Here's the thing, though. Instagram isn't a service for end-use consumers who want to find and view photos -- it's just an ap for photographers to upload to other sites like Facebook, really. It doesn't have a website where I can go search the photos by topic or join interest groups and view photos, i.e. Second Life screenshots or Central Asian photographs. People say Google+ will take over this "space" -- but there isn't a one-stop go-to place where I can see everybody's photos -- unless I circle them and follow them and scroll through all the dreck to see their photos. Maybe they will add this at some point, but it will still have wonky interface like Google always does and it won't have "pay me" built into it.
What's most important about Flickr now in terms of usefulness to somebody beyond the circle of photo-walkers, the photos that have Creative Commons licenses on them can be reused or mixed and matched by others. There's the 10 percent who create; there are the 90 percent who consume. You have to think of them, too.
Now, I'm a HUGE critic of Creative Communism, which decouples commerce from copyright and forces "sharing". The CC licenses don't have an option which says "pay me if you want to use a copy".
And that's what I really want to do. I want to PAY the photographers, not by contacting Getty Images and have to negotiate or have some huge fee for what amounts to a blog use viewed by perhaps 1,000 people before it sinks into an archive, I want to pay the photo *instantly* in microcurrency that I get from the platform like virtual money that cashes out to real money for that artist. I want to be able to tip photographers I like with this same cash when I see they've done a good job, or even commission photos in interest groups, etc. And no platform lets me do that because of the early geek Internet creators and their fundamentalist religion of copyleftism.
So when somebody is ready to make money and overcome this silly religious dogma, please call me. I will go to your site and pay you money to use your photo (or for that matter, song, texture, or any digital creation), especially if it's a reasonable price, like a dollar per use. The merger of a PayPal like payment system that works comfortably with large numbers of small transactions from digital wallets and a reliable cashout that has lots of fraud protections is what the Internet needs to get to the next stage beyond the early technocommunists. We're waiting.
Meanwhile, we will go on using Flickr. Using the silly CC license that doesn't get the author paid, or if he shuts off copying rights and puts "all rights reserved" (the default, fortunately), then I'll contact them and negotiate the price -- or *not*, because it's too much bother.
Yahoo, get rid of Creative Communism, put a grownup payments/tipping/cashout system on there and let people get paid for their creativity and time on the Internet and you can go to the next stage.
But...why wait for Yahoo to figure this out, as I think of it.
Linden Lab already has a profitable company (they say $75 million a year, it's a private company so we don't know how real that figure it, but it seems accurate). They already have a robust, very much stressed and checked and revised and troubleshot virtual currency system with an exchange called the LindEx. And they already have a great virtual goods marketing system, SL Marketplace.
So all they have to do is extend that out from virtual stuff inworld to other digital goods based on the real world -- photorgraphs, songs, textures, etc.
Wouldn't it be great if the product they were working on for an i-pad would be something like this! I believe it could make a fortune. I bet that's NOT what they are doing, however, because the management, governance and fraud protection challenges of such a system are perhaps insurmountable (which is perhaps why our Internet has never gone to this stage in 15 years, although it must).
I just want it to come into being, however. Imagine if you could go on your i-phone or i-pad or even a regular website and view photographs people uploaded searchable by topic or name or group and pay people money for their photos very easily -- either purchase the rights for one-time use or use on your blog of X traffic (perhaps the fee could be sliding) or simply tip the photographer if you liked their work.
Maybe there's a way to make files disintegrate or a kill-file to make the files disappear after 30 days? If they were all in the cloud this might be easy to do. So you pay a dollar to keep the photo for 30 days in view on your blog for $1, or you spend $5 to keep it permanently -- or whatever.
Why couldn't somebody put this today?
Then you could add songs, textures or art elements to use on websites or phones, software, aps -- anything really that is digitalized. Aps already sell in the ap store -- it's really just a question of making "the ap store" be something that has photos in it, too.
This wouldn't be something like having a PayPal button to click on. It has to be a microcurrency for small transactions that wouldn't accrue fees, that the platform owner would get a percentage of (but not these whopping gouges that Amazon gets for books, electronic and hard copy, geez, they are ridiculous -- $3.00 fees out of a $5.00 used hard copy book these days.)
So you get a wallet of microcurrency -- you might have a running subscription that costs $9.95 a month, you go around tipping, buying, perhaps even reselling if there is a way to secure the files.
We need to make the Internet pay, and end all this silly share-bear stuff.
Such a system might be hard to start (the way amazon.com was itself in its day) but it might also become so wildly popular (the prospect of making money online always is!) that it would overwhelm the ability of the LindEx to handle it. Maybe tying this business to the LindEx would be ill-advised, and it would need its own DigitEx or something. But the LindEx is a brand that has trust from about a million people. Each month, several hundred thousands of people use it to buy or sell currency to buy digital goods and services. Why not?
Recent Comments