Destroy Flickr! Do it now!
Written on 21st June 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Boris has recently published a post in which he stated that we sometimes should “kill our darlings”. Although you’ve put hours of time in something, whenever it isn’t good you shouldn’t use it. So when Boris struggled with the design of Fleck, he threw it all away and started all over again.
Let’s do the same with Flickr. It’s a great service, yet web-based – thus forcing you to push the browser back button way too many times. So Jonnie Hallman destroyed the front end of Flickr, developed an Adobe AIR app, and now offers a rather smashing way of working with our Flickr photos – called DestroyFlickr. See the differences between the photostreams for example:
Dwight Silverman from the Houston Chronicle wrote an extensive review about the Flickr application. He noted:
There are similar displays — each called a canvas — for different tasks and in Flickr. Each time you visit one, it’s saved as a workspace, making it easy to return to any earlier tasks. It’s much faster than using the back button in a Web browser. However, it only saves one photo-view page at a time, and only saves four workspaces at a time.
DestroyFlickr makes it also easy to up- and download, as it’s just a matter of dragging ‘n dropping. Apart from the positive remarks, Silverman also said that the Adobe AIR wasn’t yet a complete alternative to the online working space, since it isn’t possible to add photos to groups nor can you tag them. The latter is a major disadvantage, as tagging is one of the important features at Flickr.
Why? Read this post I wrote about director of product management of Flickr Kakul Srivastava’s presentation at Web 2.0 Expo about the importance of tagging your pics – not just because “sly Russian mathematical magic” will take place. As soon as Hallman introduces this feature, I will destroy my former Flickr experience and start floating on AIR.
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[...] generate a good deal of pageviews, but in the spirit of Ernst-Jan’s latest post on ‘killing your darlings‘, allow me to suggest either ruthlessly cleaning up the site to get it back on track, or stop [...]