Flickr video here – and I’m disappointed

Late-night update: Flickr video has arrived. It is massively underwhelming. Flickr is armed with the financial backing and resources of Yahoo, I have to imagine they’re making Yahoo a bunch of money. I think that they should have done something groundbreaking to reinvent themselves, to show how people really should be presenting video in this day. But the addition is pretty minimal.

I’m sticking with Vimeo for my video needs, and to be honest it makes me a little sad. I really would have loved to use Flickr

But on a tangent, I found some awesome “thumbs down” images at Flickr while searching for an image to go with this post.

Image above from Flickr user ahmed.alsaati. Remember that you can click on most all my images, and the link should take you to the original photo on Flickr.

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Evidence being that Heather Champ has posted a video to the Flickr Blog. Judging from this sample, their video support is far from being something that is usable. TechCrunch has a review here.

I tried to embed the video, per Flickr’s video embed code, and it was a failure. Click the “Flickr Blog” text above to see the video.

Looks pretty crappy, actually. 90 second maximum clip length? Pshaw. Even crappy YouTube lets you do 10 minute clips. And only Pro users can upload video? I don’t see much added value when you can upload 500 megs free to Vimeo per week, with an amazing user interface.

One of the reasons flickr was so popular in the first place is that digital cameras were just taking hold on the world. People needed a place to freely share photos online, and flickr was by far the best designed and most user friendly sites to do that.

The problem with this flickr video is that there are already many established video sites out there (like YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo) and I doubt that people would just switch. Perhaps as it evolves, I’ll be more interested, but I don’t think I’ll be going near it for a while.

Vimeo still seems to be the hosting site of choice for me. But I really want to be able to use Flickr for video sharing. Really badly.