Shame on you, Flickr! Shame on you.

I'm obviously not the only one cheesed off when Flickr recently announced the introduction of videos onto the site.

So, they said video-sharing has always been part of the roadmap? Nice try, but try again.

Is Flickr trying to become a Youtube? No, they said. Their defense? They don't want to become a Youtube. They merely want to allow users to post 90 glorious seconds of "long photos".

Am I even hearing you correctly? What exactly do you mean by a "long photo"? You mean a panoramic photograph or a series of multi-burst photograph? How exactly do you measure long? I'm not even familiar with this unit of measurement when it comes to photography. When it comes to "length" in photography, only print-size (inches) and shutter speed (seconds) come to mind. So, Flickr, listen up - if "long photos" refers to photographs taken with a super slow shutter speed of 90 seconds, I'm all up with that. I once saw an photo installation at the MOMA in NYC where a camera was placed across the street with the shutter opened during the building's construction phase. The result was an amazing time lapse, showing an empty plot of land transforming into the building I was in, on a wall-sized black-and-white photograph. I was totally blown away.

Oh really, please just let Youtube do their thing. Flickr should continue to do what they do best. Seriously! Didn't Flickr know what's first-movers advantage? There's no way Flickr can beat Youtube when it comes to online videos with the kind of content they built up over the past years.

It'll be really sad if Flickr falls apart because of this. Build your competitive advantage, sustain it, and not follow go around copying other bright ideas. That's not what Flickr is about!