Part of it is definitely the improvement in Facebook’s handling of photos. Facebook now provides higher quality images and the ability to share my photos with a much larger selection of friends.

And that’s where I think Flickr is starting to fall behind: there is a distinct lack of updates and new ‘features’ on the site. Twitter and Facebook are always tweaking their interface (with varying degrees of success and often with a fair bit of controversy). But the last major interface update I can remember was to sharing photos in March 2011. And that was hardly a massive new feature.

Back in May, Flickr designer Timoni West posted her views on some of Flickr’s problems on her website. The post went the rounds creating a lot of discussion, mostly because of the public critique of her employer.

She identified the contacts recent uploads screen as ‘the most important on Flickr’. I found that interesting, as for me the home screen for logged in members is the most important — it’s the first page users generally see when they access the site.

Here’s my Flickr homepage as of today:

I can’t remember this page changing for years, with the exception of the ‘people you may know feature’. I don’t think the design is necessarily flawed, I think the main problem with this page is a lack of ‘user intelligence’: much of the content shown on this page is either random or purely linear. There’s no attempt to show content from the either friends or family or other contacts whom I regularly interact with.

The same goes for the Your Groups and Explore sections: I never go through the ‘Night Images‘ group, so why even show me that? I spend a huge amount of time in the wonderful ‘Guess Where London?‘ group, but that hardly ever appears, because it’s simply throwing up random selections from my 200+ groups.

The same goes for ‘Beach Photos’. If I was back in my home town where we have lots of lovely beaches, then this group may interest me. But living in London, unfortunately the closest I am to the beach is the sandy banks of the Thames at low tide. I just got back from a trip to Munich and Austria, from which I uploaded a whole bunch of photos: why not suggest I look at a Bavarian, Alpine or Beer group? (Or even sausages!)

Often this last slot shows either groups or selections from Flickr’s Explore, another part of Flickr I think needs some fundamental rethinking. If anyone has ever tried to get into Explore, they will know it is akin to working out Quantum Physics or witchcraft. Theories abound about how it works, what penalises you, whether favourites are better than comments and so on. Looking through Explore it’s quite obvious that it’s purely machine maintained. Don’t get me wrong, there are some stunning photos in Explore, but quite often randomly strange photos appear that Flickr thinks are interesting because of a spike in comments/favourites: but a cute picture of someone’s child’s birthday party isn’t particularly inspiring compared to some of the stunning work that is around Flickr.

In my opinion, the curated Flickr Blog show cases far more inspiring photos than Explore. And I think that’s really where the crux of Flickr’s problems lie: the site is now so massive that no real thought has gone into how to inspire and showcase the best the site has to offer. Groups are so flooded with photos that keeping track of them is almost impossible. And unfortunately, if a stranger does comment on your photo, the chances of ending up with a page full of badly animated GIFs is quite good.

I think Flickr may decline until it works out how to refocus itself on inspiring its members and perhaps more importantly creating and fostering a better social experience between users.

And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.

Keeping my photostream up to date on Flickr is like a second job for me. I take a lot of photos, and a lot of candid stuff now I have a camera phone. It takes hours to select the best photos, upload them, give them a title and description, tag them, and if you can be bothered, send them to a few groups to try and get some comments, making the whole thing worth while. I have lots of friends and family back home as well who I feel indebted to keep feeding photos too, showing what’s happening in old blighty. Yes, we’re only talking a few hours a week here, but after work and getting home and doing other ‘life’ things (such as eating and washing dishes etc.), it does start to feel like a real chore.

Bandwidth, hardware, interface — none of these are a problem. With 24mbps broadband (and wi-fi to boot) at home, along with Flickr’s great interface, it’s all so easy to get the photos up, but it’s the human side of things that takes so long. But that’s the catch of the whole social semantic web: it just craves human input. And it’s addictive.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Linda Stone on these sorts of issues. The talk was based on one she did at an O’Reilly conference last year called ‘Attention‘, and it’s really an excellent read: I highly recommend it.

We’re in the middle of a bubble at the moment, which really can’t last. What happens when the 2.0 bubble bursts is anyone’s guess — who’ll survive, who won’t — but all I can say is that I hope Web 3.0 involves me sitting on a couch, relaxing, while I watch some good old totally non-interactive television. Because sometimes, you just want to turn off — and that’s getting really hard in the 2.0 realm.

Going back to the topic of photographing kids in Asia, I always felt very uncomfortable doing this, especially as a white male. There are some amazing kids around Asia with so much personality that you can’t help but photograph many of them. I found another set on Flickr with pictures from Laos, and some far more provocative photos of kids playing in the river. By provocative I mean close detail of the kids — the photographer was merely documenting the kids the same way I was. But the photographer here was female, and this is another interesting thing I picked up on while travelling — and that is that for women to take photos of kids is rarely noticed, yet with men its very different. Often I would be with other female travellers taking photos of cute kids playing or trying to sell things, and while they would snap some terrific photos, I always felt very cautious about doing so, in case someone misjudged my intentions.

Unfortunately I don’t think things here will really change. Of course men aren’t the only ones who are sexual predators, but the vast majority are, and everyone knows the appalling situation with child exploitation in Asia. So next time I’m on holiday and we see a bunch of kids splashing water or jumping off water buffalo, I might just pass the camera to my girlfriend — and make sure that ‘naked kids’ don’t appear in the title on Flickr.