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."

Technorati Tags: flickr, socialsoftware