Uber-video reporter Hermione Way (of TechFluff TV fame) stumbled on something interesting today. Yahoo! appears to be running a PR push in London for Flickr called Brilliant Spots. She duly Twitpic’d the pavement based advert from her iPhone. The site mentioned leads to a place which is really about Flickr. What’s wrong with this picture? Yahoo wants everyone to use MMS, a terrible, costly old system pimped mercilessly by mobile phone operators.
But of course, right now the iPhone does not support native MMS and it’s a fair bet that the super users of camera phones right now are iPhone users, posting to Twitpic and other related image services. In addition, sending an MMS picture of something you just find a bit “brilliant” from a normal phone costs *real money* – unlike using up the flat-rate data on an iPhone. Of course, people can use others handsets, like a Nokia, but even then there is no direct call from Yahoo to “post to Flickr” which plenty of people would recognise.
Does anyone else think Yahoo! is “fiddling while Rome burns”? Yes, they’ve been reaching out to the developer community through Hack Days and the like in London. Yes, they are working hard on Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey. But, as TechCrunch US point out, they are seriously losing the plot over search and realtime/streams – which is pretty much what everyone is talking about right now, including Google.
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