social

At its heart, Twitter is the simplest of products, but these days, the company’s product head Michael Sippey oversees all sorts of things: search and relevance, discovery, and new forays into short-form video and music.

Speaking at our D:Dive Into Mobile conference in April, Sippey noted that his world is a mobile one.

“Product at Twitter means mobile at Twitter,” Sippey said. “It’s all I think about and it’s all the team I work with thinks about. We started seven years ago as a mobile company, the service was initially SMS; we complemented that with a website that has attracted a lot of users; and the now shift has happened, the majority of our usage comes from mobile devices.”

While Twitter works to provide consistency across its core apps, it’s also finding new ways to shake things up. Sippey’s chat with AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka focused largely on Vine, the six-second-video app that Twitter bought last year before it had even launched, and has quickly soared to the top of the app charts since launching in January.

Vine, which is popular all over the world, hasn’t fallen out of the top five U.S. iOS app downloads since the beginning of April, according to App Annie.

During that time, the Twitter app (which, to be fair, many people already downloaded in the past) has hovered between No. 25 and No. 50.

Finding Vine — and bringing it to where it is now — is definitely something to gloat about. Sippey said he and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo jumped on the deal after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey saw the product and fell in love with it.

“We saw this and said, they’ve solved this problem in a really interesting and compelling way,” Sippey recalled, noting that Vine includes neither a record button or a play button.

“The beauty of what the team did, is they took advantage of the fundamental unit of filmmaking, which is the cut, and integrated that into the product so that you can actually tell stories, pretty sophisticated stories within a six-second time frame,” Sippey explained.

“And then they made it really simple to consume them, so it’s a simple follow model, and with the trending hashtags and the explore section, you can actually find great people and find great content and just scroll through and enjoy Vine after Vine after Vine.”

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I knew something good was happening when I saw the rectangles.

This week I did something that I hadn’t done for five months and 12 days: I went to Flickr on my laptop, accessed some photos on my hard drive, uploaded them, named them, tagged them, and organized them in a set.

The magic of the internet happened before my eyes, and they joined the other rectangular images on the venerable photo-sharing site. And finally, for the first time in almost half a year, I had something beside square pics on my Flickr photostream.

Yahoo announced its massive revamp of the Flickr service with three missing E’s, calling the updated site Biggr, Spectaculr, and Wherevr. But really, the update boils down to two massive changes: dropping freemium, and making an old and tired user interface awesome.

Since I was just wondering about re-upping my Pro account, the first is really significant.

Yahoo’s giving each Flickr user a full terabyte of space for images, for free, which essentially means you don’t need to be a pro user anymore. You still can, for an ad-free account, or to add even more space … but I don’t mind a few ads, and I’m only using 0.8 percent of my freely available terabyte anyways.

But the best and most important is the incredible new look.

There’s varied response to the new look, to say the least, and the official forum thread on the new layout has a staggering 241 pages of user comments: 24,102 in total so far. The vast majority of them are negative, and most of those appear to be from long-time users who liked the site the way it was, and are asking Flickr to change it back.

Good luck.

Flickr as it was was turning into a byway, a leftover, and an also-ran. Which is why most of the pics on my photostream and home page were square: they were exports, shares from Instagram photos. In other words, Flickr was changing from the place where you went to share photos from, to the place where you shared photos to. That may be a small change in the English language, but it’s a massive change in user engagement.

And it had huge effects on Flickr’s traffic, which dropped about 40 percent in the last year alone:

The new look is gorgeous and photo-centric, giving photos — the raison d’etre of Flickr — center stage.

Sure, it’s Pinterest-ic and Tumblr-y. But if you love images and imagery, the new Flickr displays photos immeasurably better that the previous iteration. In a funny modern way, your digital photostream now resembles an old-fashioned photography album, without any cheesy in-your-face design elements attempting to highlight the fact.

In addition, the new layout options gave Yahoo the option of displaying images with much more creativity while honoring the photographer’s shot selection — such as Flickr displaying panorama shots across the entire page:

I’m sold. Flickr, I’m back.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

I agree. And so does one of the more famous photographers on Flickr, Thomas Hawk:

despite all of the naysayers about the new @flickr, my page has never had more engagement than it has there in the last 3 days.

— Thomas Hawk (@thomashawk) May 23, 2013