I consider Thomas Hawk to be one of the superstars in the Flickr's community. He shoots prolifically, and almost every day I see a great shot of his go by. He's also very active in the Flickr on-line and offline communities. Thomas has been very vocal and hands on about photographer's rights. On top of all that, he also maintains a great blog where he talks about photography and technology in general. So when I read that he was going to Work for Zooomr, I paid attention. A lot of attention.

As I wrote previously, the thing that make Flickr sticky for me is the community of people. I have built up enough of a base there that I'm unlikely to switch to another photo-sharing site just for features. But if a bunch of people that are part of my personal community started hopping over to another site, then that would get my attention. The blogosphere is already aflame with the conversation about the technical end of this: should there be wholesale import/export API's or tools, who should provide them, and so forth. That's all fine, and I'm not worried about any of that, because in the end, any system that provides an API will end up having a way to do import/export. The more interesting question is, what could cause a sizable portion of the community to make the jump to a new system.

I think it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, because Thomas has said he is going to keep on going at Flickr, so for the moment, there isn't going to be a break in the network. But if the day comes that Thomas switches to Zooomr as his primary, that's going to be very interesting. When companies try to build a product or service around a community, prominent members of that community are going to have more and more of an impact.

I wonder whether over time, we'll see further and more crisp stratification of the photo sharing market: Yahoo Photos for families, Flickr for people who want to learn and get serious about photography, Zooomr for the really hard core photographers... I'm not making a prediction about either niches or residents of those niches, but it is interesting to think about.