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Where Does a Former National Geographic Photographer and Current Yahoo Exec in Charge of Flickr Share His Photos? Yep, You Guessed it Google+

06 Nov

Late last week over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher reported on the appointment of the latest high profile Yahoo exec, Adam Cahan. In addition to reporting directly into Marissa Mayer and overseeing mobile for Yahoo (super important!) it was also announced that Cahan would be put in charge of Flickr, the photo sharing site that so many of us love.

On the surface this is great news. The fact that the guy who is now overseeing Flickr reports directly into Mayer may mean that Flickr’s profile is moving up internally at Yahoo. After a few years of Flickr layoffs and shrinking, it looks like Yahoo once again is staffing up in photo sharing!

In addition to staffing up, over the past year Yahoo has probably improved Flickr more than any other year in its existence. They’ve added a really nice new justified page layout for your contact’s photos and favorites (hopefully coming to search, photostreams and sets soon!), they added a new meet up page where they are getting active with photowalks again (check out this shot from their Austin photowalk this past weekend), they created a new liquid photo format that expands photos to the size of your monitor (slick!), they also increased the maximum size for photos for paid accounts to 50MB! (Facebook and Google+ downsize your photos).

So my question is, why with so much excitement going on around Flickr, why don’t Yahoo employees use or care more about the service?

A lesser known thing about Adam Cahan, the new Yahoo exec in charge of Flickr, is that according to the San Jose business Journal he’s a former National Geographic wildlife photographer. So here’s the guy who is in charge of Flickr, definitely talented with a camera, and where is he choosing to share *his* photographs? Yep, you guessed it Google+! Here’s a photo he posted earlier this year there for the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Of course, Cahan is just following by example really here, his boss Marissa Mayer chooses to post her own photos over at Instagram instead of Flickr.

Why is Flickr such a pariah that Yahoo’s own executives (even the one directly in charge of Flickr) won’t dare to use it personally?

Certainly Google and Facebook employees share their photos on Google+ and Facebook. So why aren’t Yahoo executives doing the same thing?

I believe that leadership is done by example. I also believe that every company should encourage dogfooding and should encourage their employees to use their own products. I think this sends a better message to users when you feel like people who work for the company use it too.

The message that Mayer and Cahen send when they shun Flickr and instead post their photos on competing photo sharing sites is that those sites are better than Flickr. The exact message that they should be trying to change if they really care about Flickr.

Now I’m all for Yahoo executives testing out the competition. Actually I think that’s smart. They *should* have accounts on Instagram and Google+ and Facebook and all that — but they should *also* have accounts at Flickr and they should be acting as Flickr’s biggest cheerleaders in the same way that Vic Gundotra does for Google+ over there.

There is a current conversation going on over at Flickr in their highest profile discussion group that Flickr is dying. Yahoo should care about discussions like this. Yahoo employees should actually be involved in them and trying to convince people that Flickr is not dying, that a comeback is just around the corner — but in order to be involved in conversations like this Yahoo employees need to actually, you know, have an actual Flickr account.

It’s not hard, really, you can even use your Facebook or Google+ account to sign into Flickr these days. Directly from the Flickr sign up page: “It takes less than a minute to create your free account & start sharing! Have a Google or Facebook account? You can use them to sign in!”

Flickr’s tagline is “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” That’s been it’s tagline for years now. So if this is true, why don’t Yahoo execs want to use it to manage and share their photos? If that tagline isn’t true anymore maybe Yahoo execs should think about changing it to “almost certainly *was* the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”

I was thinking yesterday back to all the excitement that was around Flickr back in the olden days. Natural disasters tend to be things that galvanize social sharing, and especially photos. Back in 2005 when Katrina hit, Flickr was the go to place for people to post photos online about the disaster. Not only were the best user generated photos flowing into Flickr, they were flowing in fast and furious. Flickr was recognized for the Katrina photos in the national press. A group was started on Flickr to do a print auction to raise funds for Katrina survivors. The very next year Time Magazine named Flickr co-Founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake as two of the 100 most influential people in the world! Butterfield and Fake both had Flickr accounts by the way.

More recently hurricane Sandy hit New York. Was Flickr the go to place this time for photos? No. Everywhere you went in the national press it was 24/7 Instagram. It’s telling that Time Magazine — the very same Time Magazine that recognized Flickr and their founders/managers after Hurricane Katrina — recruited five professional photographers this time around to cover hurricane Sandy for them on… Instagram, the same photo sharing site where Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shares her photos.

By the way, photos taken after Oct 15th tagged Sandy on Flickr? 36,000. Photos tagged Sandy on Instagram? Over 800,000. Now just today Instagram announced photos on the web.

On a personal level, my photos at Facebook and Google+ get far more views and engagement than they do on Flickr — not just a little more, a lot more — as in hundreds of times more. I’m still rooting for Flickr though. They were the photo sharing service that I started out with back in 2004. They still have the best photo organizational tools on the web and at $ 25 for over 70,000 full high res photos of mine they are a bargain. Competition in the photo sharing space is good for all of us. It benefits the user. I just wish I felt like Yahoo actually wanted to win more with Flickr. Maybe this will change though and some day soon I’ll be able to add Mayer and Cahan as contacts of mine on Flickr. I bet as a former National Geographic pro Cahan has got some great shots.

Comments on this post at Google+.

Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

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Getty Images’ Flickr licensing deal reaches 1/2 million images

16 Oct

Getty Images’ scheme for licensing images from the photo sharing site Flickr has added its 500,000th image. The half-millionth image was shot by system engineer and photo hobbyist ‘Jiangang Wang’ for Tianjin, China, of the Minato Mirai development in Yokohama, Japan. The licensing deal, started in June 2010, allows Flickr members to offer their images for licensing by Getty. If Getty chooses to accept the request, the photographer can choose how to license their images, at rates comparable to Getty’s other images libraries.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Hacking Flickr: How to Build Your Own Personal Version of Flickr’s Explore Using Advanced Search

16 Oct

One of the things that I dislike about Flickr’s Explore algorithm is that it shows me so many photos that I’m not interested in. It seems like every time I go there I end up with a hodgepodge of photos that I dislike — overwatermarked, overcooked, etc. I’ve always been interested in is a version of Explore that would filter out everyone on Flickr except for my contacts. Over the years I’ve managed both my contacts and friends/family list to my own personal taste as a consumer of photography.

The most popular way to view your contacts’ photos of course is on the “Photos From Your Contacts” page. This page shows you the last 1 or 5 (you choose) photos by your contacts or friends/family (again you choose). So you basically have four different ways to view your contacts’ photos, but all four are by recency only.

Sometimes you might want to look at photos by your contacts in ways other than recency. Over the years I’ve added a ton of people as contacts — so many in fact that there is just no way that I can keep up with every single photo every single contact posts every single day. So instead of the recency view I’ve been looking for other ways that I can look at my contacts’ photos.

After playing around with Flickr’s advanced search page this weekend, I figured out how I can view my contacts’ photos by interestingness instead of only recency. This is helpful if you want to see what are the best (most popular) photos by your contacts over past period of times. Flickr’s interestingness algorithm gives every photo on flickr a hidden internal score. This score is based on lots of factors including how many favorites a photo gets, how many comments a photo gets, tags, where it’s posted on the web outside of Flickr, etc. The basic premise though is that the more activity a photo receives the more interesting a photo might be.

Advanced search on Flickr lets you customize your search criteria and seems to even work with empty search queries (which seem to return all photos). You can customize the search page to only search using your contacts photos and you can customize it by past time periods. So if you want to run through all of your contacts’ photos by the last day, week, month, etc. and have them ranked by the most popular photos to see if you’ve missed any great photos you can do that using this page.

The way Flickr returns photos in search is a little clunky and is not as elegant as the justified view for photos on your contacts most recent photo page, but I bet search results on Flickr end up with a justified view at some point in the future as well. A photo wall that you can favorite from is a much superior/engaging layout after all.

Anyways, these links below should work for you as well and allow you to see the most popular photos by your contacts and friends/family over previous time periods. If you command/click (Mac) on a thumbnail it will open it in another window and then you can just tab through these windows to fave/comment/view larger any of the photos you have an interest in.

Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts July 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family July 2012

Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family YTD
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts YTD

For some reason, some searches using empty queries on flickr for earlier time spans (like all of 2011) produced no photos for me, so something must have changed with how Flickr handles empty queries after 2011.

I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to search empty queries from the advanced search page. I tried to go use the wayback machine at the Internet archive to see what this page looked like in the past but apparently Flickr is blocking the internet archive from indexing this page (and other pages as well, including one specific group, which seemed odd).

Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

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Posted in Photography

Ways to Redesign Flickr Groups to Make Them More Social, Addictive and Powerful

16 Oct

Flickr is currently in the process of redesigning the Groups section of their site. Initial comments by some beta testers have suggested that more emphasis will be placed on photos and less on discussion threads. I’m not a part of this new beta group, but I thought I’d share a list of ways that Flickr could improve Groups anyways. I believe that Groups represent Flickr and Yahoo’s greatest chance at making progress in social — an area increasingly being dominated by Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other Yahoo social competitors.

Although I have not been as active in Groups over the past year, I’ve literally spent thousands of hours in Flickr Groups and feel like I understand how they work and their dynamics very well.

1. It cannot be overstated. The power of Groups are in the discussion threads. The power of Groups are in the discussion threads. The power of Groups are in the discussion threads. Discussion threads, positioned correctly, can be like crack. They can be terribly addictive. Flickr should be doing everything that they possibly can to push people to the discussion threads in Groups. This is how you turn a casual user into a hardcore top 1% Flickr user. If you can suck someone into the discussion threads you can get 100x the use of Flickr out of them. These are the most valuable members on Flickr. These are the biggest Flickr evangelists. These are the ones who will promote the site more than everyone else. Every design decision around groups should be made with the idea of how can we suck more users into the group discussion threads.

2. Toxic people are like cancer. Toxic people will drive people away from Flickr. Toxic people are the single biggest impediment for Flickr Groups to overcome today. The answer to protecting Flickr members from toxic people is simple. Create a more robust blocking mechanism which allows users to block each other. Online harassment that turns into real life harassment will drive even the most hardcore Flickr Group addict away from social. The best way to prevent this harassment is to allow users the ability to block each other. This seems so basic. Google got this super right a long time ago with Google+.

If I choose to block you then you should be made completely and entirely invisible on the site. Poof. Gone. Vanished. It’s not that you still can’t harass, but it makes it harder to harass someone when you are invisible to them in any profile they create that gains momentum on the site. This would encourage people to behave more civilly towards each other if such a tool existed.

Civility will help social for groups.

3. The goal for Flickr should be to create a page of discussion threads that are irresistible to me — an entire page of threads that I simply can’t help myself but click and converse. Any thread that is not of interest is a waste of space. Allowing me to mute or hide threads will ensure that I will be more social because I will see more opportunities to be social. There is no reason for me to see a thread about baseball that keeps popping to the top if I don’t care about baseball.

Muting threads also helps with trolling.

4. Flickr already has a super powerful tool that they are using in their help forum that they are not using in their Groups. If they’ve already coded it for the help forum it seems like a total non-brainer to simply port it to other Group discussions. This is the button that shows me posts that I’ve posted in. Obviously I care more about the threads that I’ve posted in than the threads that I haven’t.

5. Flickr needs to allow me to subscribe to threads that I’m particularly interested in and aggregate these threads on a single page sorted by recent activity. If you want people to be active in multiple groups (and you do, trust me) you want them to be able to easily follow the conversations that they care about in multiple groups. This does not happen today. Instead you have to go to group by group by group by group to hunt around for the conversations that you care about. Alternatively you can bookmark them all and go back and check them manually over and over and over again. You quickly tire of bookmarks because you are only interested in a Group conversation if there is new activity. Having a page to view subscribed threads could become the most powerful page for social on the web.

6. Flickr can’t fight anonymity at this point. It’s too late. Google and Facebook forced this issue early on by requiring users to use names that they are commonly known by. There would be too much of a revolt if Flickr even tried to institute anything like this. However, they can allow verified profiles. By allowing users to opt in to verified profiles they would give these accounts more credibility. Verification could be done similar to how Google used to do it by having users submit a Government ID or simply enter in a credit card number on a credit card. NOTE: I’m suggesting this be made voluntary and OPT IN. If people want to opt in, why not let them? If someone wants to keep their hackerboy6969 anonymous ID this is fine too.

7. Groups need to be promoted more heavily by Yahoo and Flickr across other sections of the site. Yahoo especially and Yahoo search especially, should be driving traffic to Group discussions. Although Yahoo probably has to talk to the boss (Bing/Microsoft) at this point to try to have any input on the search algorithm, if I were Yahoo I’d try to get multiplier algorithm weightings for public group conversations and general group pages. If someone is searching for information on a new Canon 5D Mark III, by all means, Yahoo should try to route them to a Canon Group on Flickr where they can find discussion about this. It’s relevant and invites them to be more social on a Yahoo property.

8. Group invitations should be super easy. New blood is vital to ensuring Group success. Flickr should make it as easy as possible both to invite other Flickr members to your Groups and also equally important to invite people outside of Flickr to your Groups. A Group invitation section should be made which will invite Facebook friends, people in your address book, etc. to your Group. A few years back Flickr made it actually harder to invite people to Groups. They probably did this due to criticism about people spamming Group invitations. Instead of making Group inviting harder, they should simply allow users to mute these notifications by category.

9. Flickr needs to come out with a super easy way to consume and converse in Group discussion threads on both iPhone and Android.

10. Create a +/@ mentioning system for Groups. If someone +/@ mentions me in a Group (or on a photo page discussion as well), I should receive a notification. This is smart and will invite and encourage me to respond.

Flickr Group discussion threads represent the future for social at Yahoo not just for the photo community that is Flickr. Group discussion threads represent the future for social ideally for millions of other topics. To this end, Flickr Photo Groups should be considered as much a social lab as anything for Yahoo. Thoughtful consideration should be made as to how to push this Group format out to the rest of the social web, inviting people to create and manage groups about everything from knitting to hang gliding. Yes, photos are important. Every Group should have a photography function, but the discussion threads really are the power.

By making Groups more about photos and less about discussions Yahoo squanders this important opportunity.

I also believe that Yahoo should consider hiring some people to live in Groups for a while. They should hire some super smart people who understand psychology and just have them live in Groups. Their entire job should just be to participate in Groups all day long and then thoughtfully consider how to make them more and more social.

Although Yahoo staffers are in some Groups today, I can’t think of any who are particularly hyperactive there. It’s hard to be social in Flickr Groups when you’re so busy writing code all day, but Yahoo does need some talent to really get in there and understand what they have — because today I don’t think they really do and I’m not sure there’s ever any HOPE that senior management at Yahoo will ever truly understand what they have with social in the form of the seedling that is Flickr Groups.

Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

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Posted in Photography

Flickr Close to Releasing a Redesign of Global Navigation, Explore and Groups

16 Oct

Yesterday I was contacted by a Flickr member asking me if I knew about the redesign that was being done on Flickr. Although I’d assumed that more redesigning was coming to Flickr after earlier releases this year, I wasn’t aware of what specific changes were being implemented or considered. I’ve seen screenshots of some of the new redesign but haven’t had a chance to seriously examine it yet.

Apparently a beta group is currently testing changes to Flickr’s Global Navigation, Explore section and most significantly Groups. Rollouts of the new design have begun and some users are now seeing a different layout on Flickr.

I’ve long believed that Groups represents Flickr/Yahoo’s most significant chance for winning at social. Although it doesn’t sounds like the new Groups layout is set in stone yet, some of the comments made by beta testers would seem to suggest that more emphasis is being placed on Group photos and less emphasis on Group threads. Here are some of the comments in the thread

“That would be a complete disaster and kill off what remains of the active discussion groups on Flickr. Good luck getting new members to ever click over to the threads.

The Groups List page redesign is also, quite frankly, atrocious. Much harder to find groups, not to mention the graphics are messed up.

I will personally lead the revolt if the new group page design sticks. It will KILL any attempts to integrate new users into group discussions.”

AND

“Oh lordy, that’s terrible. The group rules page and intro is completely hidden and while the emphasis on photos is kind of nice, it completely destroys any importance of the description and the discussion.

Not liking that at all. It makes groups look about as social as a set is now. Completely wrong direction and neuters the group other than a photo collection.”

AND

“Let me rephrase that. If you go ahead, and make the groups look like what I just saw, I will mothball every group I have, log out and never log back in. This is not out of some idea that I’d be contributing to an effort to twist Flickr’s arm into doing anything, but because navigation will have broken down so badly, that the site will no longer be worth my time.”

These initial comments regarding Groups are disappointing. It sounds like Groups may be headed in the wrong direction. I’ve long been critical of Yahoo executives who can’t/won’t join Flickr publicly including current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (Mayer posts her photos on competitor Instagram instead of on her own company’s photo sharing site Flickr). Previous CEOs Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz likewise did not have public Flickr accounts.

Part of my criticism of Yahoo execs not using Flickr is that without dogfooding it, without really digging into it, I don’t believe that they can begin to understand the promise that Groups represent for social on Yahoo. Based on early comments on the Group redesign page I’m also beginning to worry that even Flickr staffers don’t truly understand the power of social that Groups represent.

Whether or not this new Group redesign will be rolled out to other users or not remains to be seen. I’m concerned though that time/engineering/design talent wasted making Groups *less* social might just be another blunder after a long line of previous blunders made by Flickr in terms of the guesswork on what users may or may not want.

Last year Flickr rolled out a wonky photo/chat feature, for example, that was quickly killed earlier this year. Time wasted going in the wrong direction hurts Flickr and hurts their chance at social.

Photo sharing is a super competitive space and becoming more and more important. Great care should be taken to make photo sharing as social as it can possibly be. Every single step towards redesign should be asking the question, will this make Flickr more social or less social?

Although I’m not part of this beta or test group, I’m usually not one to keep my opinions to myself, so I’ve also written a companion post to this one entitled “Ways to Redesign Flickr Groups to Make Them More Social, Addictive and Powerful.”

Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

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Posted in Photography

Flickr responds to ‘Dear Marissa Mayer’ appeal with an appeal of its own

01 Aug

Screen_Shot_2012-07-19_at_4.35.27_PM.png

When Marissa Mayer was named new CEO of Yahoo recently, Los Angeles-based journalist Sean Bonner posted an appeal for her to ‘please make Flickr awesome again’, signing it ‘the Internet’. On his blog, Bonner commented that Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, needs someone to ‘put some support behind it, bring it up to date, give it an actually functional mobile app and commit to keeping it alive’. That appeal went viral, and today Flickr posted a response. Click through to read Bonner’s appeal and Flickr’s humorous reply. (via wired.com)

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Flickr introduces users to Aviary as Picnik ends

05 Apr

Flickr has added the option to use the Aviary photo editing service, following Google’s decision to close the Picnik service that had previously been offered. Flickr users will be able to make basic edits and image corrections using Aviary which, unlike Picnik, is HTML 5-based – allowing its use on non-Flash devices such as the iPad. However, while Aviary offers similar cropping, filter and sticker options, it loses Picnik’s paintable curves adjustments and other more advanced options.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Flickr poised for much-needed interface improvements

22 Feb

Venerable photo-sharing site Flickr is reported to be on the verge of its most drastic redesign in many years. The New York Observer’s tech blog, BetaBeat interviewed Flickr’s ‘Head of Product’ Markus Spiering, during which he demoed a remarkably Google+-like gallery interface. He also appeared to rubbish the site’s clean but rather dated ‘small photos, lots of white space and information’ appearance. Yahoo says the improved gallery view will apply to the ‘From your Contacts’ page from the February 28th, with the uploader coming in March. (from BetaBeat) Updated with detail from Yahoo.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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