Why doesn’t Flickr let you tag your friends in photos?

One of the favourite stories Facebook likes to tell is about their photos application. Facebook doesn’t even have a very good (by which I mean feature-rich) photo application. But what they will tell you is this. In just 6 months, Facebook’s photo application surpassed the usage all other internet photo sharing applications in the US combined. All this on the strength of one little, brilliant, why-didn’t-we-think-of-that feature called tag your friends.

In facebook you can tag your friends in photos, and when you do, they -and friends of that friend- are notified that a new picture has been posted of your friend. It’s great, it’s simple it’s been around now for a dog’s age now (in internet terms) so…. Why doesn’t flickr (the web’s original social photo site) allow you to explicitly tag your friends in photos too?

There can only be a few possible explanations why flickr doesn’t let you tag your friends, please choose your favourite:

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