People interested in the future of Commons as a platform should take a look at what's been happening with Flickr and astronomy photos.
1) The Royal Observatory ran a contest for "Astronomy Photographer of the Year" on Flickr. This was a really sophisticated website that used Flickr as a backend.
2) The Blind Astrometry Server is a bot that automatically figures out where astronomical images are in the sky, and tags them appropriately.
In both cases, the Flickr staff weren't even aware these things were going on, for quite a while.
Anyway, I was reminded of all this today since someone sent me a link to the Royal Observatory's retrospective on the whole thing:
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/romeo/romeo.html
And here's two blog posts I wrote for Flickr some time ago:
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/02/18/found-in-space/
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/03/20/tags-in-space/
In my view there isn't anything that Flickr is doing which Commons couldn't be doing. And as much as I have faith in the Flickr team, I have doubts about whether Yahoo is the right place, long term, for the world to be relying on for such resources.