Friday, April 25th, 2008...3:24 am
An open letter to the good folks at Flickr
Dear Flickr,
We’ve been together for awhile now. From the 2005 days when I awkwardly learned your (at times) complicated help and settings navigation, while maintaining a free account, to purchasing server space (my way of saying I pay for a professional account), uploading, to date, 2676 items and being blessed with 40, 354 views. I’ve spent many an hour learning your cool organization options like sets, collections, tags and favorites. Ironically, the first photo I posted was of my Dad and his wife Fran at my brother’s wedding rehearsal dinner (for new readers, my father is gone now). Being able to share photos and comments with family, friends, and in many cases strangers has been a huge catalyst not only in getting other folks on board with your cool site, but in building and maintaining a (now) hugenormous group of “contacts” now posting and sharing and so on. Let’s face it, just as for some of us paging through a print album can be a special experience, so is watching folks’ experiences through their photography, even online. Especially, for me, because so many of my friends and family live far and wide.
Some of my best referencey moments as a librarian have involved teaching others how to make the best of your site to meet their needs and maybe even learn something new and cool they might consider. Flickr, I could go on and on, but I am sure you get that I am saying I am a fan.
I hint above that I have many people in my Flickr contacts list. I don’t have enough time to keep up with all of their work. But when I have some time to catch up, I usually have 700+ photos in my contacts’ stream, and sometimes miss family photos, or photos by friends - many of whom are librarians and do cool things and travel to awesome places. Flickr, I want to be able to rank “recent photos from your contacts.” Perhaps a screen divided in three, or three (really four) links to recent folks. Family, Friends, Contacts, and Private would suffice for my needs. But in the future I may wish to have even more of my own categories for contacts. It’s not that the art from a “contact” is any less interesting than that of “family;” still, I would like to have the option of choosing. I don’t want to miss any more family photos because I had to scroll through 5 or more pages to see them.
Flickr, back when you were a little guy I could write you a letter and you’d respond. Now, I am directed to discussion fora and FAQs. That’s why I am writing, for the record, on my web site. The other reason is perhaps to hear what other users are feeling about this issue?
Maybe I am being picky and overly critical of such a great site, but seriously, let me separate out or rank my contacts so I don’t find family photos 2 weeks late.
Sincerely, jennimycontactslistisblissfullylargeandi’dliketomakesureidon’tmissanyone.
a.k.a jennimi
7 Comments
April 25th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I think your open letter gets at two main points that I have also felt about web 2.0, that we like how it helps us connect (to people, pictures, etc.), but we want to be able to customize how we connect.
Every now and again I try coining a new phrase, and today I’m giving the phrase “web 2.5″ a shot. I’m defining “web 2.5″ as that stage of a person’s immersion into web 2.0 technologies when they realize they are over-networked and start to pare back on the social network sites, contacts within those sites, and level of interaction with contacts.
I used to love flickr and used it a lot, joined lots of groups, made lots of contacts, posted lots and lots of pictures, and even worked on a project that would implement the flickr API. At some point, I felt it wasn’t quite worth all of the effort, and I dropped all of my groups and a large number of contacts on flickr.
I saved a few contacts and look at their new photos regularly. I did the same thing on FaceBook after a while, too, but with FaceBook it was more an effort to remove annoying applications than it was disconnect from people.
The strength of web 2.0 and social networking in general is that the designers of social networking sites try to keep it simple and standardized enough that people with any level of technical skill can use them.
If the developers of social network sites haven’t thought of a way they could make our use of their designs almost infinitely customizable, it may be because customizing would require too much tech skill for the average user. But, it may be that so far, the developers haven’t felt any significant pressure to go any further than they already have–after all, the sites work.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:19 am
I have to agree with you . . . this would really be beneficial to many of us using the site! (BTW: I finally got a blackberry yesterday)!
April 27th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Jenn, you raise an excellent point. It is due to the flaw in contacts that I find myself checking the larger screen of contacts to look back over recent photo additions. I, too, was missing photos. Another thing they could do is not show the last five photo additions, but only one per contact. At least then you would know that there was activity from those contacts.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Well said all, and thank you for contributing.
Doubting T, I accept your “Web 2.5″. But that speaks to the present. We’re forward thinkers. What is “3.0″, or is it time to break free from this lingo box and find something else to describe the evolution of humankind and the web?
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 am
I wouldn’t dare try to predict what people will call web 3.0. I have a feeling, however, that it has to do with the integration of network applications and devices that are not traditionally considered computers.
Phones haven’t quite gotten there yet, because of the way most mobile browsers alter the way the pages are displayed or fail to make use of a web site’s plug-ins.
But there are microchips and network connections everywhere, and today I decided that I want to buy something called an Eye-Fi that will wirelessly send pictures from my camera using a special SD memory card (if your camera uses SD cards, check it out: http://www.eye.fi/).
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
ooooh… that sounds so cool. My camera (the slr) is nice, but no wireless.
I’d also like to amend my previous comment in which I queried, “is it time to break free from this lingo box and find something else to describe the evolution of humankind and the web?” to read:
is it time to break free from this lingo box and find something else to describe the co-evolution of humankind and the web?
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Also, the more I think about it the more I like Readergirl’s idea of showing ONE thumbnail per contact per “some specified upload period” (my addition), so we’d at least know there was activity.
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