Flickr: A Photo Sharing Website (Overview)
December 16th, 2008Flickr: A Photo Sharing Website
An overview by Javier Velasco-Martin
Introduction
This blog post is based on a presentation I prepared this last semester for a course called Technologies of Friendship directed by Fred Stutzman at UNC-Chapel Hill. This post is a transcript of my notes with some minor editing, it is not a completely polished article, I still consider it to be a bit raw for that. Hopefully, if there’s interest, and thanks to your feedback, it can be edited further for publication elsewhere.
Slides available on slideshare.
Origins
Flickr is launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, the system was based on some tools that had been previously developed by the same company for a massive-multiplayer game. This intrinsic sense of play is one of the things that have made flickr so attractive.
Flickr had an explosive growth and currently contains more than three billion pictures (Nov. ‘08). In March 2005 the company is bought by Yahoo! with all of its employees.
On April ‘08 they include the option of uploading Videos as well.
Some ideas from literature
Mayfield (2005) compares: Online Communities as top-down, place-centric, moderator-controlled, topic-driven, centralized and arthictected. SNSs as bottom-up, people-centric, user-controlled, context-driven, descentralized and self-organizing. Flickr makes use of both approaches with an extremely flexible architecture.
Lerman and Jones (2006) find an important influence (55%) of Social Browsing on image views. Schmitz (2006) suggests that ontologies can be induced from Flickr tags. Marlow et al (2006) propose a model of incentives for tagging:
- Future retrieval
- Contribution and sharing
- Attract attention
- Play and competition
- Self presentation
- Opinion expression
Van Zwol (2007) confirms the importance of Social Browsing on Flickr and discovers that geographical closeness of visitors is negatively correlated with the photo’s popularity.
Flickr User Model - Bryce Glass 2005
This diagram sums up the interaction possibilities among Flickr members and Photos, we will review most of these features during the rest of this presentation.
Tagging / Folksonomies
Flickr was one of the first websites to popularize the use of user tagging, which leads to the type of organization system known as folksonomies. Folksonomies can be considered the opposite of taxonomies in terms of organization schemes: they are flat, non-controlled, quickly changing and imprecise. Folksonomies trade precision for utility; they are inexpensive to build and maintain given the volunteer participation of multiple users.
Comments, Favorites and Notes
Aside from the open (or actually customizable) access to tagging the photos, Flickr also allows for more traditional forms of web-wise social interaction such as comments which had been previously present in blogs, youtube and others, and the ability to mark favorites.
Groups
Flickr also allows its users to create groups. People can start groups and set several types of rules and restrictions for them, groups contain a pool of photos, and support discussions organized by threads.
This flexible architecture allows for the creation of all kinds of groups. Some of the most popular and obvious examples are geographical groups, that contain pictures and conversations regarding particular locations and cities.
Topical Groups
There are also, topical groups based on the interest of their members. Therefore, we have groups for pet lovers, all sorts of naturalists, cars, sunsets, sunrises, clouds, even airplaine trails. As with the general web, user-populated Flickr also contains several groups dedicated to all flavors of porn, most of which are blocked only to members thanks to the privacy controls enabled by Flickr which allow these pictures to be kept safely from the view of children.
Play Groups
The variety of options in how groups can be configured on Flickr has fed its users’ imagination, and this has generated a variety of games within flickr. One of the first and most popular groups of this kind is Squared Circle; where people push the limits of their creativity in order to crop pictures of circular objects and frame them inside a square image; it is amazing to watch the variety of images in this group.
Another popular Flickr game, which oddly enough violates the basic principle of requesting people to upload only pictures to which they own the copyright, is called Name That Film. In this group, cinematography lovers will post obscure pictograms from their favorite films, and the other members of the groups must find the name of the movie the picture belongs to, and then, Name that Film. This group makes use of tags for unnamed and named.
Some groups mix regionality and playfulness: In Guess Where NYC, the members upload any picture of the city; especially those that do not contain the typical touristic markers, and once more, the rest of the members have to guess the exact location where the image was taken. Some people have given a precise address for the picture of a bush. This group also marks pictures with guessed and unguessed tags. There are similar groups for many major cities in the world.
User created awards
One of the side effects of long term membership on Flickr is that you become a better photographer. The continuous participation ends up polishing your critical sense, and you learn the gamut of possibilities that photography entails.
Sometimes, this learning process is catalyzed via groups: Flickr has several groups of award-invited-only photos, such as the Flickr Diamond group . You can only become a member of this group if someone gives you an award and invitation to send your photo into the group, many times, this also gives you the right to award other’s peoples pictures, inviting them into the group.
Critique groups
There are also groups where you frankly post your images for public dissection. One example is “Rank me” where for each picture you send (only once a day) you are asked to rank the last five pictures that had been posted into the group before yours in an order from one to five. Another group is called “Delete me” where you send your images for critique, viewers will mark “keep” or “delete” in the comments, if your picture reaches five “delete” comments, you will have to erase it from the group, and from Flickr.
Self-potrait project: 356 days
Many photographers feel uncomfortable in front of the camera. In the 365 Days group, members are asked to get creative and submit a different self-portrait every day during a complete year. This exercise requires discipline, and hard work, as there are many days within a year where one is not in the mood or does not have time to invent and produce a creative self-portrait. Most people ending the task feel a huge sense of accomplishment and have learned more about themselves.
Social Browsing
One of the most important innovations of Flickr is how it allows users to filter the incoming stream of images depending on their authors, this means you follow a list of particular people in the way you consume the content. This is known as Social Browsing, you browse the contents of the site according to your social contacts.
This is seen on the Contacts page of each member, and people can control the level of relationship with people by classifying them as contact, friend or family. Authors can control the privacy level for each of their pictures, allowing it to be seen by the public, only their contacts, their friends, their family, or even only by themselves.
Hierarchical contacts and Permissions
Here we can see how contacts are categorized accordingly, so when a user sets permissions for their photos, he can anticipate which of his contacts will have access to them. Flickr also displays a list of users who call you a contact, so you get an idea of the people who follow your stream.
Tag clusters
Another interesting use that Flickr gave to their tags is to publicly display the clusters that the tags fall into. Clustering is performed by text mining on the images, and thanks to this process, one can see the ways in which Flickr users view different topics, how they collectively organize the concepts such as party.
Interestingness
Another Web Mining tool that Flickr uses computes activity on the photos, revealing their degree of Interestingness, this secret formula is able to find amazing pictures every day, and it is a great honor for any Flickr member to see his images appear on the Interestingness pages for any given day. Many users have a particular Set of pictures grouping such images from their stream.
Wrapup
- Flickr is one of the most successful and well designed photo-sharing websites currently available.
- Its architecture mixes the best of online communities and social network sites to cater all types of user needs and motivations.
- Participation is further empowered by its high levels of usability, clean design, and its inherent sense of playfulness.
- Flickr’s design embraces its users’ creativity on many levels.
Flickr, is so far the most engaging and flexible photo sharing site. It has recently incorporated the possibility of uploading videos. This flexibility allows people for many types of interaction. You can meet fellow photographers through the play and topical groups. It is amazing how one can find many photos of remarkable quality, and also several wonderful professional photographers on Flickr sharing their work and becoming mentors for other people.
References
- Mayfield, R. (2005). Social network dynamics and participatory politics. In J. Lebkowsky & M. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Extreme democracy (pp. 116–132).
- K. Lerman and L. A. Jones. Social Browsing on Flickr. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’07), Boulder, CO, Mar 2007.
- Patrick Schmitz. Inducing ontology from flickr tags. In Workshop on Collaborative Web Tagging, 2006.
- Marlow, C. et al. (2006). Position Paper, Tagging, Taxonomy, Flickr, Article, ToRead. WWW2006, May 22–26, 2006, Edinburgh, UK.
- R. van Zwol. Flickr: Who is Looking. In ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2007), 2007.
Bonus: my favorite Flickr Photographers
This is a list of people whose work I had never heard of before, and found through Flickr. Most of them are acknowledged photographers and make active use of Flickr as a tutoring tool for their audience of admirers.
You are also cordially invited, of course to view my own photo stream on Flickr, as well as the pictures I have marked as favorite during my travels along the Flickr scene.
