As part of its mission to build up the brand and become valid again, Yahoo! is releasing some great apps recently. The Yahoo! Mail app has received some good reviews and the Flickr App seems to have been labeled by some folks across the net as an Instagram killer. Not so fast…
After using both apps fairly extensively, well as extensive as it gets in the case of Flickr and my one week with it, I have found many things that make Instagram better.
Vintage Cameras Look Cool!
First, I love that Instagram locks images to a square format. The idea at Instagram is that photos are supposed to be in the old square film format of yesteryear when vintage camera were all the rage. Although people continuously do it wrong, resulting in a fail pic with big black bars on the top and bottom, the square format does a lot in my opinion to force some artistic quality to the simplest pics. It requires the photographer to choose the most artistic sectional capture. This is more of a personal preference, and people who have been annoyed by the square requirement (“INSTAGRAM WON’T LET ME POST MY FULL SIZE PIC!!!”) will find this as a non-issue affecting neither performance or effectiveness.
Application Speed
On to the real stuff – the Flickr app is just too slow for me. The photo filters lag for a brief second and everything from loading a new pic to uploading the finalized pic just takes longer in Flickr. Also, since Instagram rides on Facebook for the most part, there is a much larger community on Instagram and my friends list is enough to keep me entertained for a few minutes when I check my feed. Flickr is a ghost-town on my feed. It’s like Google+ but with pics.
Social Network Tie-Ins
At least the Flickr app allows users to tie in Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, there is no tie-in for Four Square and definitely not for Instagram. One of the pics I uploaded to Facebook from Flickr didn’t include my description and took away from the joke I was making.
Instagram FTW!
Overall I think the Flickr app has potential and the value of Instagram is diminishing with the release of the Flickr app and Twitter’s recent updates that allow photo filters to be applied to pics being tweeted. Even Facebook Camera is a usable alternative to Instagram and I think it’s only a matter of time before that site isn’t nearly as relevant as it has been over the last year.
What do you think? Have you had time with the new Flickr App? Does it work better than Instagram for you? Answer in the comments section below!
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