Is Facebook trying to kill Flickr by upgrading our photo experience?

Facebook has made two changes recently that has pretty much place photos more front and centre of the user experience. The new design Facebook Fan Pages have relegated the Wall and Tabs to side bar status, making your photo album top dog in the page layout. It’s the same for your member profile page.

On top of that now it has changed how we currently view photos. Now we get an entire photo slide option that’s large and beautiful. Why this and why now?  Is Facebook trying to kill Flickr by upgrading their users photo uploading, tagging and sharing experience?

Could this be a play to outdo Flickr which leads when it comes to photos? No other social media channel comes to even half as close as Flickr which has 130 million photos uploaded every month. Compare this to “Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos” according to Facebook. This is part of the content arsenal which sees 30 billion pieces of content (e.g., links, photos, notes) that are shared on Facebook each month (Source: Royal Pingdom).