This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The social/community/discoverability side of it.
I suspect Flickr's successor will either:
1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability" stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),
or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down this path).
This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The social/community/discoverability side of it.
I suspect Flickr's successor will either:
1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability" stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),
or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down this path).