Flickr Flicks at Video

What do you do with all those short home videos you shoot? Clog up grandma's e-mail with a clip of your child blowing her nose? Post it to YouTube alongside pirated clips of "The Daily Show" and Tay Zonday's latest offering? Neither feels wholly satisfactory.

Enter Flickr. On Monday, the popular photo-sharing site finally made good on a years-old rumor that it was just about to, any day now, add a video feature. Paying members with a "Pro" account are now able to post 90-second (150MB) video clips that anyone can watch for free. Videos are cleanly integrated as thumbnails alongside users' photos—either play the video inside its thumbnail, or click to enlarge it. No popups, no ads. And as with photos, users can leave comments, captions, geotags, embed videos in their blogs and set privacy restrictions so only friends or family can view them.

What's the big deal? Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, is hardly about to slay the Goliath that is Google's YouTube. But while this may not sound like an online revolution, it does significantly enhance the Flickr experience for its 42 million monthly visitors. Kakul Srivastava, the company's director of product management, calls these short videos "long photos"—moving snapshots that people can take with their point-and-shoot digital cameras. At just 90 seconds, you can't exactly shoot a shot-for-shot remake of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." But Flickr is betting a short snippet of your narcoleptic cat or a child blowing on a "naughty dandelion" is bound to be more satisfying than a still photo of the same thing.

Srivastava gave me a preview of the new feature last week when it was still in its "supersecret beta" phase. Because Flickr is as much a social-networking site as it is a photography enthusiast's water cooler, like-minded users had already begun forming communities and groups online. Srivastava pointed out one meme, or trend, that had emerged among beta testers—the fridget, a video taken from inside a refrigerator as someone (or some dog) opens the door. Wanting in on the fun, I posted my own fridget to my long-dormant Flickr account. My insanely dorky video garnered its first comment within five minutes of going live in secret beta. Within 12 hours of going public with Flickr's video launch, it had been viewed more than 2,000 times. How fantastically gratifying. (I posted the same thing on YouTube—zero hits so far).

It is just this experience that will make the video feature a success for Flickr. A pro account costs $24.95 a year, so it seems unlikely that a stampede of new users are about to flood the site with cash. But video does make it more fun for people who are already hooked. Of course, some of the more passionate photo purists on Flickr aren't thrilled: a small handful users have already begun voicing protest in the comments sections under some videos ("I SAY NO TO VIDEOS ON FLICKR," one user plastered in the comments to my own clip). And if users want to see footage from last night's Democratic debate or studio-leaked rock videos and the like, they can cruise over to YouTube, or video.yahoo.com for that matter. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens on the site after the next event or protest of significant newsworthiness—there are plenty of photos of recent Olympic torch protests, but no videos that I've found. In any event, Flickr will be policing its site to ensure that it remains 100 percent user-generated.

This is good news for heavy users like Stephanie Fysh, a freelance editor in book publishing who joined Flickr to hone her photography skills three years ago. "I was really hesitant about video at first. I feared that Flickr would to turn into MySpace or YouTube," she tells me. "But I've been loving seeing people's kids talk, seeing their pets run around. It's this real life thing that's really compelling when it moves and speaks. It's going to be really good for that feeling of community—to hear someone's voice when you only know them on the Internet, which for a lot of us in the nature of the interaction of the site." That, and refrigerator-themed home movies.

© 2008