I jumped when I saw that the Organizr no longer refers to the content of sets and collections as photos but rather as things. I could smell something was cooking up.

That’s when I read the announcement at home page:

Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream. 90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

90 seconds? Pro members only? Not that I care about the pro only part, I’ll probably be a Pro user till the day that I die, but I think permitting the upload of little low quality clips isn’t exactly along the lines of the Flickr philosophy that I thought I had decoded, being “we host your pics in high res till you spill your guts”. Do I really want to see random videos of some 16 year old pose myspace-style with some of her friends and post it on Flickr as “precious memories”? No, unless she’s very hot, and even then. Is this going to steal the disk space that I was supposed to use for photos? Is it going to slow down Flickr servers to Youtube speeds? And 90 seconds? I just can’t see this catching on.

Yup, a tad overdone. Stick to pics, Flickr, noobs can all go and post on Youtube anyways.

Get the beef.