New Flickr Video -The Attention Span Annihilator

It's official: the human attention span is now so short you've already forgotten the beginning of this sentence.  Flickr, the image website so fast-moving it can't even wait for a second vowel, is unveiling a new video feature that's only ninety seconds long.

Yep, nine-zero seconds.  A minute and a half, also known as "the maximum time anyone has watched Steve-O without wanting to punch him".  Such a short video might look as useful as a fun-size fire extinguisher, but if there's one thing services like Twitter have proven it's that modern webbers want things FAST, they want them NOW, and they want oh hang on while I alt-tab to check the other window.

The awesomely abbreviated timeframe should shield Flickr from the main problem plaguing YouTube: most "user-created content" is absolute crap.  It turns out there's a reason we've been paying actors and writers all this time, and the uber-breviloquency of the new service will reinstate that most vital of skills: editing.  The long lost art of checking which parts are bad, and throwing them away.  While the inglorious efforts of Web 2.0 seem focused on shoveling up everything that's ever been written by anything, ever, and rubbing it in the faces of as many people as will click, we can hope that this new focus on haikuistic compression will cut things down to the good parts.  Or at least if they suck, they'll suck for less than two minutes.

Flickr will also evade the lawyer-siege that comes free with any video-hosting site, with a near-total lack of copyrighted content: people are unlikely to click on "Die Hard With a Vengeance Part 45 of 93".  A generous 150 MB file size means these miniature filmettes won't look grainy - important since they'll be sitting next to a gallery of crisp images.  Another heroic dam holding back some of the sea of internet-crap is the fact you have to pay for the service ($25/year for uploading), though that's no guarantee of quality.  If there's one thing XBox Live has proven it's that parents will pay good money for their kids to annoy the ever-loving sanity out of complete strangers. Expect the usual moaning and bleating from those who insist that everything online should be free, but whose main logical support for that point seems to be "Because I want it to".

The very smart ability to run the new videos on the thumbnail page means people can record introductions to galleries while at the event, no longer leaving the viewer to decode what the album title "That Time In Dave's 2006!" might mean.  This intrusion of the internet into the real world joins the ranks of such cyber-party-activities as "The Facebook Tag Crowd", trying to cram as many people as possible into a photo for maximum linking goodness, and the "Social Life Fake-Out", whereby the lone contestant heroically dives from photo to photo in a vain attempt to convince complete strangers that he actually knows people (and that some of them are women).

Posted by Luke McKinney.

 

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.Thanks!

Flickr Video http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/08/flickr-video-launches-a-unique-experience/