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It seems to me like Flickr is stagnating. What with all this talk about how Web 2.0 companies are constantly evolving, implementing changes in days, instead of months, I haven’t seen anything new out of them in a while.

I troll the Flickr Ideas forum and there are a couple of things people have been clamoring for that have yet to be added. I know blindly following people’s feature requests doesn’t give you the features they actually want, only the ones they think they want, but the ones I’m thinking about aren’t even esoteric.

Smart Sets

Smart sets would consist of images that match your criteria. Photos of yours tagged with newyorkcity and sunset, would go into a set with their own page. As you upload more pictures with those two tags, they get added to the set automatically. If you want to show off your photos that other people liked the most, you can select your most “favorited” images, and limit it to only the top ten. This information is actually private, so the only way to share it would be in a Most “Favorited” set.

AJAX Commenting

Come on, flickr brought AJAX into the limelight, letting you edit a photo’s title and description without reloading the page. But posting comments is still in the dark ages. Previewing one even reloads the page, not to mention editing and creating. It adds pages that you have to navigate backwards through as well.

Tag Auto-complete

del.icio.us has had this for a while, and makes it “deliciously” simple to use. Start typing a tag and it’ll see which tags you’ve already used match. This helps you tag faster and more consistently. It could be used to search through your tags too. They wouldn’t have to index every tag you’ve ever used, just the most common ones, to minimize search time.

I just hope their lack of progress isn’t a sign that Yahoo! is diverting their resources elsewhere. Yahoo! has it’s own online photo service which conceivably could be superceding Flickr. I’d rather believe that they’re cooking something really fantastic up.