Object-Centered Sociality at Flickr

While many social net­works, includ­ing LinkedIn, map people’s rela­tion­ships to each other based on com­mon acquain­tances, oth­ers bring peo­ple together through their com­mon inter­est. The photo-sharing site Flickr, for exam­ple, makes it very easy and com­pelling to con­nect and build rela­tion­ships with oth­ers based on pho­tos (a pic­ture says a thou­sand words).

Jesse James Gar­rett from Adap­tive Path recently spoke to Eric Costello, Client Devel­op­ment Lead for Flickr, who high­lights the object-centered nature of social­ity at Flickr:

“Flickr was really envi­sioned ini­tially as an orga­ni­za­tional tool for an
indi­vid­ual who has this huge col­lec­tion of pho­tos. The social net­work was built
in just so that you could restrict access to your pho­tos. But what has really
taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great plat­form for shar­ing
with the masses, and not just with your small col­lec­tion of friends.

With The Game Nev­erend­ing, we hoped to build a mas­sively mul­ti­player online
game that was totally Web-based. You could play the game from a browser
wher­ever you were.

The inspi­ra­tion in large part for Game Nev­erend­ing was actu­ally Neopets,
which had tremen­dous suc­cess among young peo­ple as a way to inter­act with
oth­ers around the idea of this mag­i­cal world of pets that you cared for, and
all sorts of things you could collect.

When we ini­tially launched Flickr, it was just a stripped-down Game
Nev­erend­ing inter­face, with pho­tos instead of game objects. You had a list we
called the Shoe­box at the bot­tom of the inter­face with all the pho­tos you had
uploaded, and you could drag them to other peo­ple to share them. You could drag
them to an IM con­ver­sa­tion too. That was all straight out of The Game
Neverending.

Some­one once described Flickr as “mas­sively mul­ti­player online photo
shar­ing.” I think that’s a good descrip­tion. There’s kind of a feel­ing of
explo­ration within Flickr. It feels like a world where you can move around and
find won­der­ful things – the won­der­ful things being the great pho­tographs that
peo­ple upload.

And because it’s got the social net­work aspect of it, you can kind of build
neigh­bor­hoods within Flickr. The page in Flickr that shows you all the pho­tos
from your friends and fam­ily is very much a space like you might find in a
game. It’s a place where you go and inter­act with the peo­ple you know.

What we’ve found is that peo­ple really want to share them with a wide
audi­ence. And I think that’s the key dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who love Flickr
and peo­ple who love those other sites. Peo­ple who come to Flickr want an audi­ence.
We’re all about facil­i­tat­ing shar­ing how­ever you want, whereas the other sites
are more about upload­ing your pho­tos to a place where you can eas­ily print
them. They’re not as much about explor­ing and shar­ing with the masses.”

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