Flickr’s mobile makeover

Posted December 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm by Kakul Srivastava, Flickr

 5 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Ask anyone on the street if they have photos in their wallet and you might find a handful. But on their phone? That’s another story. Over the last year, our team at Flickr has seen a more than 50% increase in the number of people who have accessed our mobile site. And it can’t go anywhere but up from here.

That’s why we’re rolling out a radically overhauled m.flickr.com site today. What we’re most excited about is that now –- for the first time -– you’ll actually be able to play Flickr videos back on your phone. Ever since we launched video, we’ve let you upload your “long photos” directly from your cell, but we think the playback functionality is pretty huge. It’s based on the Yahoo! Video Platform and takes advantage of its ability to serve content to a wide variety of phones, screen sizes, and video/audio codecs. We’ll be rolling video playback out over the coming weeks for handsets that support streaming video, starting with the iPhone and iPod Touch today and more to come.

The new m.flickr.com sports a sleek new interface that makes it significantly easier to view your photostream and sets, and puts recent activity (yours and your contacts’) front and center. We’ve also added a bunch of new capabilities, like letting you add contacts, favorite images, and change your privacy and permission settings –- all while you’re out walking the dog. And, in support of our “eyes of the world” vision, we’ve also added the ability to explore the latest “interestingness” photos.

iPhone users have been playing with our new mobile incarnation since we released our beta in October and now we’re expanding the experience to any smart phone that supports browsers like Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mobile.

The mobile phone has become central to how many of our users take pictures and how they share their view of the world with the important people in their life. We think the new Flickr mobile experience reflects all the cool possibilities that today’s advanced and rich mobile web has to offer, combined with all the functionality Flickr members know and love.

So grab your phone, bookmark m.fllickr.com, and enjoy photos and videos with a big smile on that small screen.

UPDATE: Just a clarification. Video playback is available for videos uploaded yesterday onward. Over the next few months, we’ll work to make the entire catalog of videos viewable on our mobile site.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Tagged: Flickr, iphone, mobile, news, yahoo! video

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5 Comments Add your own

Sarah B. | December 4th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

Very cool, looks **great** on the iPhone and it’s fast. Only problem is my videos don’t play. I’m just supposed to tap the video thumbnail right?

Nirav | December 4th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

My videos don’t play either. Is video available for iPhone or just other smartphones?

Nicki Dugan | December 5th, 2008 at 10:20 am

@SarahB and @Nirav: Oops, we should’ve specified this, but the video playback is just currently available for videos uploaded yesterday onwards. Over the next few months, the Flickr team will work to make the entire catalog of videos viewable on m.flickr.com. Apologies for that oversight.

Vince | December 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

Isn’t this kinda lame when you can use an iPhone for the sample pictures but yet Yahoo doesn’t have an iPhone app out for Yahoo when our competitor do for their product?

sandy | December 7th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

i am also having same problem videos don’t play