An inventor of social networking speaks

There are several great nuggets for netrepreneurs in this GigaOM Q & A with Fotolog co-founder Adam Seifer. First of all, Adam was a co-fouder of SixDegrees, arguably the first social networking service. He then relates how his current venture, Fotolog, got popular in Brazil by accident; a popular Brazillian journalist wrote about them on her blog and the virus spread from there like crazy. Interestingly, Fotolog hasn’t yet targeted english speakers and still has over 3 million users. This clearly illustrates that there is a lot of opportunity for web apps outside of the U.S., even for apps that wouldn’t stand much of a chance here due to gorilla-like competition (for instance, Bebo is now bigger in the U.K. than MySpace is). What every netrepreneur should pay close attention to is how Adam says Fotolog can compete against competitors like Flickr. I’ve included it here, and I’m wondering, is this really much of a competitive advantage?

On Fotolog users can only upload one photo a day, so this brings response and feedback. That photo will likely be interesting and users will check for their favorite user’s photos of the day. On Flickr users upload everything they have and the site is based on tagging and organizing — you put everything you have on the site and your family and friends can see your stuff. But Fotolog is a community based on that once a day photo (concept.)

Essentially, Fotolog is saying “we don’t want all your photos, we just want one a day that is the most interesting”. It forces people to be more selective and it makes each photo more important. It also means that if you subscribe to all your friends’ photo feeds, you’re never going to get a deluge of photos. In fact, by limiting the number of photos to one daily from each friend, it encourages people to comment and interact around those single photos because it’s easy and quick to do. It also keeps people coming for more on a daily basis. It’s a great use of the concept of scarcity. But my question is, couldn’t Flickr easily add this concept to their site? They could create a sort of ongoing contest or just straight up copy Fotolog. I don’t see this one photo per day concept as being a compelling differentiator. What do you think?