Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.
Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit...you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos,' of capturing slices of life to share."
The philosophy is decidedly different than that of YouTube, and most likely the intention is not only to control size, but also subject matter; it is positioned to be member video and not the more wide-reaching (and copyright-challenged) posts of YouTube.
Videos can be uploaded and organized in much the same way as photos. They can be organized alongside photos in Sets and Collections or separately. An initial test of posting video shows that, like photos, links embedded in descriptions are nofollowed, but links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them and pass on PageRank.
A footnote: slipped in at the end of the video announcement is a second announcement that Flickr is doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded to 20MB per photo for pro accounts and 10MB per photo for free accounts.
- prev
- 1
- next
