I use instagram lots now to take little snippets. They flow nicely into my Facebook or Twitter streams. I rarely use Flickr apart from for more “curated” photos. My usage of flickr is really dying off. And I think I know why
Flickr, has never provided a way to see the most relevant content from my contacts. I can see the top five, or a single photo on the friends page. That doesn’t provide me with completeness, so I used a friends API call to give me an RSS feed of all photos.
Services like Facebook have long treated completeness as being an impossible goal, so they prioritise what they show you. Granted this leads to some of my friends bitching about that prioritisation but they are starting from the pragmatic position that “You will never see everything because there is too much”.
I don’t think flickr ever really solved that problem. I get that it’s much harder than atomic things, because in many case a clump of eight photos is relevant, rather than any one of those, but I don’t have a meaningful way to dip into the stream and get the most interesting stuff, merely the most recent stuff.
It’s a problem that every online service needs to solve. If the user can’t see everything, how can we give them a chunk of relevant stuff.
(and uploading with instagram is “frictionless” to use the latest jargon, compared to the clunky flickr app)