Flickr Machine Tags Rule, Y! Local & Yelp Don’t

I *heart* Flickr machine tags. The integration with Upcoming (e.g. Flickr & Upcoming) is a model of Web 2.0 bliss. Yes, I’m a nerd (this post definitely goes beyond the more flattering “geek”). But, watching my identity (and thus content) seamlessly span the best-of-breed services of my choosing makes my heart melt — seriously, I’m that big of a loser. And the most beautiful thing about it is that this integration has absolutely *nothing* to do with the fact that these two products happen to both fall under the same purple corporate umbrella. The Flickr machine tags API is totally open and can work with any site that applies for an application key. (I must add that 360 tried to do a lot of this type of stuff with the ill-fated Feeds, but the implementation was just too proprietary and confusing to really catch on.)

If Web 1.0 was a land-grab of getting users to store stuff with your service (and holding on to it as tightly as possible), Web 2.0 is about creating added value with stuff that’s not locked-in to and may not even be stored with your service. Yahoo! Photos used to gladly allow you to upload high-res images, but only paying subscribers could get them back at their original resolution — this is mercifully no longer the case. Flickr never tried to use your investment in their service as a coercive force (either to get you to stay forever or to pay to leave). Instead, they focused their energies on features that created value on top of your initial investment of uploading and possibly annotating your photos. To succeed in a market with no real switching costs (e.g. the consumer internet), when users invest in your product, you must use that investment to make it better for them to stay not to make it harder for them to leave.

As big a mental shift as this is from the business models of only a couple of years ago, I feel like this type of philosophy is pretty much conventional wisdom at this point (at least in my circles). That’s why I was so shocked to see that neither Yahoo! Local nor Yelp are using Flickr machine tags to link photos to establishments in their databases. Instead, both ask you to upload your photos directly with the sole purpose of correlating with that establishment. Puke!!! I already have my chosen best-of-breed photo sharing service. Why are you *forcing* me to duplicate that effort and use your crappy single-purpose tool as well?!

I took the above photo at the Great Western Steak and Hoagie Company in LA this weekend. I thought it was a pretty cool photo, so I uploaded it to Flickr from my phone. Tonight, I was going through this weekend’s photos adding tags etc. And instead of placing this photo on the Flickr map (which is an awesome, but unscalably time-consuming feature), I wanted to link it to local reviews of the place where I took it (and maybe even write my own review). I was disappointed, but not wholly surprised to find Yahoo! Local doesn’t yet have Flickr integration (disappointed because they’re in the same Business Unit, not surprised because the overlap between audiences is probably relatively low). But when I pinged my friend who works at Yelp to see if they had Flickr integration hidden somewhere on their site (a feature that would have totally gotten me to switch from Yahoo! Local, which only integrates with my less useful 360 identity, to Yelp), I was sorely disappointed.

Not only was she unaware of the machine tags feature on Flickr (admittedly, relatively new), but even after an explanation insisted that Yelp was more interested in having me upload my photos to them than making it easier to integrate with the service where I (and I’m sure a substantial portion of their user-base) *already* upload our photos. I guess my disappointment stemmed from the fact that I had been tricked into thinking that Yelp was a Web 2.0 version of Yahoo! Local, but then it dawned on me — it’s really Web 2-faux. Yes, it’s got the sexy, young, geek-chic brand identity that we’ve come to associate with the second coming of the consumer Internet. But when you actually take a look past the surface, there’s nothing more than an old-school reviews site with some excellent (and “cunningly cost-effective“) hipster marketing. I would hire Stoppelman and co. to take my stodgy old product and give it youth appeal without substantive changes anytime, because that seems to be exactly what they’ve done with Yelp.

Once I came up with this little hypothesis, I scoured the Yelp site for any evidence of true openness. Any developer APIs? Nope. Content syndication? Yes, a couple of RSS feeds — but, that’s more Web 1.5. Any identity portability in or out (MySpace badges and the like)? Not that I can find. Yelp employees (cuz “Yelpers” are the users), come one you can do better. Facebook has some awesome APIs, and I’m sure you guys share a huge overlap in target demographics. Why not hook up to that and import all my relationships without me having to recreate my entire social map from scratch in your system? Or create badges so I can display my Yelp activity on other sites? Or hook up to Flickr machine tags so I only have to upload my photos *once* — oh, we covered that already.

Om was talking today about social networks as a feature of all products. He brings up a good point of the inevitable commoditization of the technologies that spawned Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. But, I think there’s a more important point to be made than the trend towards the elimination of the standalone social network — and that’s the demand for social network neutrality. I may use a lot of different services online (and will only continue to use more), but there is only one me. The companies that offer me cool services to express myself while allowing me to connect these various dots of my online identity into the meta-picture of my choosing will have the competitive edge on the post-2.0 Web.