Sounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?
Flickr’s official stance on the time limit is this:
Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?
We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.
Just try it! It’s fun once you get the hang of it.
If that’s the case, why not put some kind of filter on the size of photographs? The number of photos in a set? The number of photos uploaded by an individual? There are lots of people posting photos to Flickr that could easily fall into the same category of annoying and boring wedding videos. Why treat video differently?
Yup. Only plays the first 90 seconds of an 8:24 video. Stupid.
I actually like the idea. I use youtube for more full featured, edited video but will likely use flickr for the videos I shoot on my still camera. I wonder if they are trying to distinguish themselves from other video sharing sites? I do see your point about possible contradictory concepts but I’m looking forward to housing my video snippets along side my photos.
I think the 90 second limit makes some sort of sense. I see them trying to keep the community focus the same as it has been, mainly personal photo sharing. I think flickr has an interest in keeping the video content on their site constrained to mostly unedited small clips from primarily-still cameras. I don’t know how you really accomplish this. The 90 second limit might a little clumsy, but I can’t think of anything better right now.
If the limit were the result of some technical scalability thing, like that they didn’t want people posting 500MB HD videos, I’d be fine with it.
But they describe the limit as being put in place to save us from boring wedding videos that are too long.
That is Flickr providing aesthetic judgement over materials that haven’t even been posted yet. They don’t do that for any of the photos that are uploaded. Why is video different? Why do they need to be able to save us from boring videos, but not boring photos?
Why do they allow the ugly/tacky/annoying “photo prize” comment spammers to continue with their drivel, but want to be able to enforce that I won’t upload that 1 hour video of waves rolling onto the beach?