I haven't blogged for 14 days (day#21 was last), and I don't think I'll become a regular blogger, but today I have more flickr ipernity comparison stuff on my mind to put somewhere. First: I changed the network activity report from "every day" to "every week" for several reasons:

  1. There is no instant notification. It takes up to 24 hours to get the notification about activities on your stream. (On flickr it's about 1-30 minutes) After that long time, it's not urgent enough anymore to deserve a mail notification. If you have to regularly click on the activity page anyway, a weekly mail report is enough.
  2. There is no "activity on your stream only" notification. There's just the full network activity report. And that is too much: "You had x visits, Your extended network has gained y members, New albums shared with your network, New docs shared with your network, Latest comments written, Latest replies to your comments" and so on. If you have contacts, you get a mail every day. And after a while, you don't read them anymore.
  3. You aren't notified about votes (favs) in the activity report. (I don't know about notes, because I haven't got any, yet.) On flickr you get notified about comments, favs and notes on your pics, and that almost instantly. If there's no mail in your inbox, nothing happened on your stream. And if nothing happened on your stream, then there's no mail in your inbox.

With flickr I used my mobile phone very much. It supports the brand new flickr mobile interface to comportably surf around (ipernity doesn't have a mobile interface at all), and it keeps me informed by the mail notification mentioned above. With ipernity my phone is of no use.

What ipernity has (and flickr hasn't) is (besides those visit notifications) that you can show your online state to other members, and, if they're online, even chat with them. I did so yesterday evening, but I won't do that again (and I don't show my online state). It was nice talking to that fellow Bremen guy, but it's not what I do with a photo sharing site. Ipernity is very I'm-online-now-and-dedicated-to-ipernity-stuff-and-nothing-else versus I'm-offline-now-and-don't-have-ipernity-on-my-mind while flickr is more like constant background noise (at work by mail notification and everywhere by mail and mobile access) but with less things you can do and see while you're online. That's a totally different social community concept.

I don't know what I like more. I think for both sites it's what you make of it that counts.

There's one think that I'm missing a lot on ipernity, though: Where can I see the pics I have faved? (I know I faved Icy for example, and I can see that on it's page, but where's the list of pics I have faved so I can find those pages?) And why am I not allowed to see who the three other users are who voted for that photo? This is how I used flickr. I went to the stream of pics I have faved recently and looked who else did fav them since. Then I looked at the streams of photos they have faved. You can't do that on ipernity, too. So the flickr key photo navigation system isn't cloned at ipernity. The most important feature set is missing entirely.

So is the second most important feature: The flickr guest pass stuff. A killer feature.

On ipernity you get small details instead that are nice like a text saying "You saw this doc for the first time 1 minute ago" or the nested comments feature if you reply to a comment. On the other hand, there are funny restictions: If neither you nor the member sharing the doc is pro then you can't show the original of a photo even if the original is small (like the Network pic that is 800x524). On flick the original restriction holds for large images only.

Oh, and one more bug: If you have an umlaut in an album name, it's shown as a space in the album page.

Ok, that's it for today. This blog entry is a bit long, but that's inevitable if it's the first after 14 days.