Flickr Wondring

Posted on | December 26, 2004 | 11 Comments

Lane and Nadav have been posting thoughts about Flickr, and I couldn’t help but throw my voice into that echo chamber.

Lane is right when he says it’s about the pictures. He’s wrong that the network is simply the plumbing. That is, depending on his meaning of “network.” Those sites that truly succeed on the web do so because of a fundamental appreciation of what “the network” brings. Amazon, eBay, and Google being the biggest, shiniest examples. They get that the network, with its constituent elements of people doing things, and through those activities, somehow connecting to each other (whether it’s direct, as in items on eBay, or indirect, as in different people buying the same product on Amazon, linking to the same page in Google), they get that that connection is meaningful, exceedingly meaningful, and if you can leverage that behavior, you can provide an experience orders of magnitude more interesting than when you ignore that connectedness.

Nadav is onto something when he compares Flickr to a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. And for identifying the importance of play in Flickr. (This is the point at which it might be helpful to explain that the name of Flickr’s developer, Ludicorp, comes from the word “ludic”.)

But the comparison doesn’t strike me as wholly apt. MMPORGs are about the players. Flickr, as Lane pointed out, is about the pictures. More than the people. No, really. Obviously, the pictures are taken by people, and the primary connection that a member of Flickr has is with other people.

But Flickr starts and ends with the picture. My most viewed photo is of my color-organized bookshelf. People viewed it because of what it is, not because of who I am.

Also, an MMPORG must have some kind of economy. Some system to measure risk and reward, to incent people to achieve more, do better, etc. Such an economy would run contrary to the Flickr ethos… If people tried to, I don’t know, game the system by filling it with photos whose only point was to engender popularity, well, it would make the system much less interesting.

Also, I think, an MMPORG must be escapist. Allow for leaving this world and entering a place of fantasy. Flickr, being about the photos, being about the snapshots, really, is firmly grounded in our world. It provides joy through it’s multiple perspectives on reality.

Anyway, this isn’t to detract from Nadav’s post. His points are insightful, and valuable. It simply is to push and poke at this thing we all love, to better understand it. Though, I wonder: is this analysis of Flickr like dissecting a pet? Yes, you know how it works, but, well, you kill this thing that you love?

Comments

11 Responses to “Flickr Wondring”

vanderwal
December 25th, 2004 @ 8:22 pm

You seemed to have hit on the right blend of ideas to bring together. It is Lane’s picture component and it is Nadav’s integration of play. Flickr is a wonderfully written interactive tool that adds to photo managing and photo sharing in ways that are very easy and seemingly intuitive. The navigations is wonderful (although there are a few tweak that could put it over the top) and the integration of presentational elements (HTML and Flash) is probably the best on the web as they really seem to be the first to understand how to use which tools for what each does best. This leads to an interface that seems quick and responsive and works wonderfully in the hands of many. It does not function perfectly across platforms, yet, but using the open API it is completely possible that it can and will be done in short order. Imagine pulling your favorites or your own gallery onto your mobile device to show to others or just entertain yourself.

Flickr not only has done this phenomenally well, but may have tipped the scales in a couple of areas that are important for the web to move forward. One area is an easy tool to extract a person’s vocabulary for what they call things. The other is a social network that makes sense.

First, the easy tool for people to add metadata in their own vocabulary for objects. One of the hinderances of digital environments is the lack of tools to find objects that do not contain words the people seeking them need to make the connection to that object they are desiring. Photos, movies, and audio files have no or limited inherent properties for text searching nor associated metadata. Flickr provides a tool that does this easily, but more importantly shows the importance of the addition of metadata as part of the benefit of the product, which seems to provide incentive to add metadata. Flickr is not the first to go down this path, but it does it in a manner that is light years ahead of nearly all that came before it. The only tools that have come close is HTML and Hyperlinks pointing to these objects, which is not as easy nor intuitive for normal folks as is Flickr. The web moving forward needs to leverage metadata tools that add text addressable means of finding objects.

Second, is the social network. This is a secondary draw to Flickr for many, but it is one that really seems to keep people coming back. It has a high level of attraction for people. Part of this is Flickr actually has a stated reason for being (web-based photo sharing and photo organizing tool), which few of the other social network tools really have (other than Amazon’s shared Wish Lists and Linked in). Flickr has modern life need solved with the ability to store, manage, access, and selectively share ones digital assets (there are many life needs and very few products aim to provide a solution for these life needs or aims to provide such ease of use). The social network component is extremely valuable. I am not sure that Flickr is the best, nor are they the first, but they have made it an easy added value.

Why is social network important? Helping to reduct the coming stench of information that is resultant of the over abundance of information in our digital flow. Sifting through the voluminous seas of bytes needs tools that provide some sorting using predictive methods. Amazon’s ratings and that matching to other’s similar patterns as well as those we claim as our friends, family, mentors, etc. will be very important in helping tools predict which information gets our initial attention.

As physical space gets annotated with digital layers we will need some means of quickly sorting through the pile of bytes at the location to get a handful that we can skim through. What better tool than one that leverages our social networks. These networks much get much better than they are currently, possibly using broader categories or tags for our personal relationships as well as means of better ranking extended relationships of others as with some people we consider friends we do not have to go far in their group of friends before we run into those who we really do not want to consider relevant in our life structures.

Flickr is showing itself to be a popular tool that has the right elements in place and the right elements done well (or at least well enough) to begin to show the way through the next steps of the web. Flickr is well designed on many levels and hopefully will not only reap the rewards, but also provide inspiration to guide more web-based tools to start getting things right.
lane
December 26th, 2004 @ 10:13 am

i love it when i’m right.
meg
December 27th, 2004 @ 8:52 am

i haven’t flickr’d lately, but i found their groups to be pretty much dead. (i must be in all the wrong groups, eh?) deciding that flickr must be all about the pics, and i wasn’t into the pics all that much, i stuck with (no donut for you) orkut (which definitely has the mass of people required to have busy community activity). it was an orkuteer that introduced me to multiply where i’ve been ever since. they have the pics and the groups and a means of having discussions outside of an affinity group format.
nadav
December 27th, 2004 @ 9:56 am

I’m not sure MMORPGs are about the players so much as the interaction of players and space. And flickr has both: the “space” of flickr is the photos. In terms of an economy, it sounds like they’re working on it. But, still, I don’t want to overstate the analogy; flickr is certainly not Everquest. And, all that said, your last sentiment rings really true for me, so I’m going to try to stop analyzing it
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