Flickr is a photo sharing site that was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. When YouTube was first launched, a lot of people thought it was similar to Flickr except for its video technology. Soon YouTube overtook Flickr in popularity, thanks to its superior video sharing capability. People started preferring YouTube to Flickr as broadband adoption increased and connection speeds improved.

Users like uploading their videos on YouTube. Yahoo! hopes the same behaviour will get users to upload their videos alongside their photographs. The company intended to introduce video to Flickr in May 2007, according to its co-founder Stewart Butterfield. This announcement was repeated in August 2007, but in typical Yahoo! fashion, they are too slow to change for the better and so far nothing has happened.

According to TechCrunch, one of the reasons for this tardiness could be that they are trying to figure out a way to make Flickr video different from other video sharing sites, such as YouTube, so that users can find some novelty in it.

Flickr video is not expected to replace Yahoo! Video. It will be a separate entity. Kakul Srivastav, director of product management at Flickr says “the audience for Flickr is different.” Flickr has always been a photo-sharing site. It has lost a lot of its clients to other video-enabled sites like YouTube and will have to provide something different to win back these customers.

Yahoo! might think they have found some solution and an announcement in this regard is expected soon. Employees at Yahoo! and Flickr are being very tight lipped about all this and are not admitting to anything in spite of the numerous rumors.

However, the general online public probably won’t care. Video on Flickr is destined to be just another feature on a popular photo-sharing site, rather than any competition to YouTube.

Users can currently browse a map of the world and click on the markers to view images from various continents, zoom in on a specific location to find photographs from that place or view a geographic layout of a particular user’s images.

The upgraded application will provide a new, enhanced world map with photo streams, and something called Flickr Places, which would enable one to limit searches to specific locations and see a variety of information deemed relevant to a particular spot upon the globe, be it a city, town, or even a single landmark. Flickr Places will identify 100,000 searchable hotspots from the existing map application, and combine it with the advanced search and new features such as “hot tags”.

The new tool is particularly suitable for travelers to view and share photographs. Visitors to the Yahoo!-owned social media site can filter results on the maps application by group, person or date of the image.

Flickr receives over 40 million visitors each month and hosts more than 2 billion images. Flickr maps can be accessed by clicking on the link below:

http://www.flickr.com/map/