Fast Fiction

Sean at Blogging.la has this way of making me sign up for new web services (he sends me an invite). So over the past year or so I’ve signed up for a variety of sites, including Buzznet.com, Tribe.net, Meetup.com, and now Flickr.com.

I’ve resisted Flickr because I already have a photoblogging site, I have my own site (typetive.com - nothing there yet) and The Man and I are about to launch our own photo gallery site. My other problem with them is the fact that they dropped the E in flicker. Dunno, just bothers me. 

But I have to say, I like Flickr quite a bit. It’s similar to buzznet in that it’s a community and you can leave comments and have friends and syndicate content. What it has that buzznet doesn’t have is the ability to show high quality photos. Buzznet can’t show anything bigger than 400x400. Though Flickr’s default is a little smaller than that, if you see a photo you like, you can see it in its full scale size if you want. Buzznet lets you hop right into content though - when you go to someone’s home page you see their little recent gallery, their most recent image with all the comments. Flickr makes you click on an image before seeing that stuff, which I think makes the community part of browsing other people’s photos just a little tougher.

Flickr is new enough that they don’t have a lot of advertising yet, and some of buzznet’s banner ads on their site bug the crap out of me. I can’t stand animated banner ads and I loathe ones with sound to the point that I do not keep the sound on with my laptop at home and I will leave a site that has any advertising with sound if I’m at the office and not go back until the next day when I figure they’ve rotated to a less intrusive ad.

So, for the moment I have both services in my left column. Buzznet’s Marc Brown graciously gave me unlimited uploads when I signed up and I’m really fond of the easy to use service and of course I’ve made friends there. Flickr has an upload limit of 10 megs per month, which is quite a bit (and I expertly maxed it out last night!). At the moment I’m duplicating my content on both streams. Flickr is offering their “daily zeitgeist” animated badge that you see over there. (Will also has one on his site.) Anyone have any thoughts on which they like better? Or should I just go back to hand coding whatever images I want to have their and forget this syndicated stream stuff?