My friend Flickr
With all the hype around social software being bandied about, there are
a few sites that get it right. I've been hearing a lot about
Flickr
lately, both online and from friends. Finally had a chance to check it
out. I was a bit skeptical, I mean after all I have gallery
software on my
personal web site
already. But I do find the idea of developing online community
interesting. I don't really get the appeal of sites like
Friendster (maybe I don't have enough time on my hands). But
sites that function around shared interests, experiences and memories,
like
Del.icio.us and Flickr
make more sense to me. And it seems like if anything comes out of
this Web 2.0 stuff that people are trying to quantify, average joes and
janes will get this type of site. People like software that
mirrors things they do in real life and in real life people share and
talk about photos.
The Flickr interface is really well thought out from both an aesthetic
and usability perspective. They make it easy to figure out common
tasks and the pointers and instructions are in everyday language (not
codespeak). There's RSS everywhere for those of us who are
starting to use the web in more of a subscription model. There
are tags to make it easy to categorize images, similiar to the way
Del.icio.us does links. And most importantly, there are lots of
ways to interact. You can put notes on images, comment, send to a
friend, download in different sizes and mark images as favorites.
The privacy issues show good consideration I really like the
inclusion of various Creative Commons license schemes, allowing you to
mark your images for how you allow them to be used. There is a
fairly extensive set of licenses you can use and you can set defaults
for all images or apply a license to a batch of images.
There are upload tools available that are also well-designed.
Very simple, wizard-based approach that is easy to understand. I
like the Windows XP version and found it very intuitive. Even
though I write software, there are plenty of sites and software where
the interface doesn't make sense without digging into the help.
That's not a problem here as far as I can see. There are other
nice touches as well, like the image panel that you can put on your own
site to point to Flickr. It rotates a series of images via Flash
into the panel on your site. Very cool.
Let's not forget the most important part, the social part. This
is a great way for friends and family to share sets of photos. In
this way, it's different than some of the traditional online galleries
in that the whole purpose of Flickr is sharing through images.
You can set up your family and friends as contacts and you'll
automatically see their images and vice versa. If you wish, there
are several types of groups that you can create as well, from public
groups that anyone can participate in to groups that require permission
to join.
Yahoo acquired Flickr earlier this year and I think it will prove a
smart acquisition for them. I've used Yahoo Groups and I'm not a
big fan to be honest. I find the interface clunky and the
intrusive ads drive me crazy. Maybe they can take some tips from
the Flickr folks, as this is much more of a user friendly (and sticky)
web site.