connecting*the*dots

Actually, Ofoto was purchased by Kodak a while back, so I guess I’m just being a Web 1.0 romantic. Either way, flickr’s recent announcement of printing capabilities — including partnerships with QOOP (coffee table books and posters), Englaze (photo DVD’s) and Zazzle (customized photo stamps)—just launched them (Yahoo!) straight into the forefront of Web 2.0 business models. The Long Tail possibilities with this service is almost endless.

I had always wondered how an open format like flickr would be able to provide hard prints outside of *your photos* from a legal perspective, but with a simple printing preference setting (the same type of setting you use to make your photos private or public in the first place), to a non-lawyer’s naked eye, it seems like that sticky issue is solved. Of course, you can always still download other people’s “protected” photos, upload them as private images and print them from your set of photos, but that’s true across the web — CafePress provides even more copyright infringement possibilities. I just ran that exact scenario on a photo that I wanted as a poster, but I only did so because it had a “Some Rights Reserved” Creative Commons license attached to it. I’m sure the guy will add a print preference to his images that matches his CC license one of these days.

As for the user experience, the QOOP interface uses interaction elements from both flickr and Yahoo! (great collaboration between teams), making it really easy to use. I had a bit of a problem when I tried to create a poster with multiple images, as the preview seemed to randomly choose which images to use from my selected images, but I’m sure that functionality will be tweaked soon enough as it’s (all together now) in forever beta mode! My only complaint of the service is that the QOOP and flickr logo (above) is automatically appended to the bottom of the poster. Branding an automobile is one thing, branding a poster is a bit tacky.

All in all, it’s some really nice work from Stuart Butterfield and team. I’m eagerly looking forward to more print customization features in the near future.