Our friends one two floors down from Y! Shopping have released a UI upgrade for Flickr. They are no longer in beta... they are in Gamma! Nice.
They've advanced their interface by utilizing many DHTML dropdowns, updated their global navigation, and changed the layout to 3 columns of photos if you have no sets, and two columns if you do. The sets are now on the right hand side, and the user navigation is above the photos instead of on the right. The organizr has been updated as well. Plus they've done something that should have been done from the beginning... they've placed search at the top as a persistent element. Yip! Actually if they just did that I would have been happy.
At this point I'm not sure how I feel about the changes. Things seem to be more complicated now. I loved how simple it used to be. Simple links, simple pages. Ya always need to be very careful about rolling out UI updates. At first blush, this one seems a tad much.
