More thoughts on Flickr

I have been thinking a lot about Flickr over the last few days. For instance:

* As discussed earlier, how should it evolve?

* How many ways could Yahoo,! currently in turmoil, ruin the whole thing?

* What about widgets?

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Widgets are the new, Web 2.0 thing. They got those vampire things on facebook, those slideshows on to myspace, and Yahoo!, Google and Apple talk about them a lot. No one has really figured out what the secret sauce is in these, but everyone knows that they hold a lot of potential. They can be moved between devices, they can be embedded everywhere, they can update in real time. They're cool stuff.

So what about Widgets in Flickr. Would you want to embed things in your profile page.... well, maybe, but that's not very exciting.

What you'd probably want to do is embed widgets on top of your photos.... to make slideshows, prints, adjust the tint, organize, edit. Whatever anyone can thing of to do with photos. And they'd enable easy ways to export photos to whatever place you could possibly want (online, offline, on t-shirts).

And what if you employed this widget concept not as a badge that gets stuck on some page, but as little mini applications. Like effects you can add to the dropdown menus. And what if Flickr did the same things for other media that they could host at some point in the future.

It would be a showpiece for how Yahoo! wants to evolve to being a content *platform*.