Do One Thing Well
Fred Oliveira has an excellent post up on his blog about how Flickr is venturing into incorporating video into their website. Fred very persuasively argues that Flickr is making a terrible mistake by venturing into online video, and that they should stick to the simplicity of dealing exclusively with photos.
This re-emphasizes what we’ve been saying over here at NextCrash for the past few days. Web services should do one thing, and do that one thing well. Over-extending your brand into areas you’re not good at is risky, and can hurt your company’s reputation.
If Flickr wants to create a video-sharing web site and spin that off under a separate name, that would be great. Bringing Flickr’s simplicity of managing photos to a new service for managing video would be a valuable and interesting alternative to YouTube.
