Where Flickr Can Improve
For various reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about Flickr lately. Flickr says their mission is to change the world. A noble purpose to be sure, and completely doable, but to do that you pretty much need to have the world on board. Flickr already has the professional photographers, the serious amateurs, the A-list bloggers, and the grammar police, but there’s still so many more people that they can bring into the fold. Maybe I’m just a terrible advocate, but for every person I know who uses Flickr, there’s still at least 10 that don’t even know what it is — and don’t know why they should be using it.
These are the people you change the world with: moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, “regular” people (for lack of a better term). People are busy. They prioritize their time. For some of us, checking out the latest web applications is how we spend our time. Others put that way, way, way down on their list. So for them to adopt something like Flickr, you need to give them features that make it obvious and simple for them to pick up. Here are some (free) ideas I’ve come up with:
1) Email subscriptions
Flickr offers RSS feeds for all sorts of things: individual photostreams, specific tags, groups, etc. For those of us in the early adopter group, this is great — I love the RSS feed of my contacts’ photos. But my mom, for example, doesn’t want to, and shouldn’t need to, install an RSS reader or use Bloglines just to subscribe to my photo feed. All she wants to know is when I upload new pictures of Connor.
For this, Flickr should offer email subscriptions. Anybody should be able to come along and tell Flickr: “Email me when this person uploads a new photo.” No Yahoo/Flickr account required — just an email address. It can even be made as complicated as all the feeds, where you can subscribe to email notification when someone uploads with a specific tag or adds a photo to a group.
The technical implementation of such a feature is non-trivial, but Flickr has a history of adding innovative, and technically challenging, features. Certainly there will have to be limitations in place so that Flickr can protect me from drowning in a flood of emails if I subscribe to all new Kitten photos — and perhaps, in that case, protecting me from myself. Adding this feature allows people to remind themselves to visit Flickr — and the more they visit Flickr, the more the greatness of the application’s other features will become obvious to them.
2) Shared password private photos
Like many social software applications, Flickr allows me to set privacy options on my photos. In this way, I can either let the public at large see my photos, or just my “friends” or my “family” (or both). For a fair amount of photos, Erin and I have decided to make them private — viewable only by Friends and Family. But for this to work, all my friends and family need to have Yahoo/Flickr accounts — and need to be marked, by me, as friends/family. With an extended family the size of mine, this is… difficult.
Erin and I make use of Trixie Tracker to keep track of Connor’s diapers, sleep, and nursing — an incredibly valuable service, but not relevant and worthy of a separate post. But what is relevant is the fact that Trixie Tracker allows me to share our data by defining a password. I can then give that password to whomever I want, and they don’t need to setup a separate account. In fact, with TT I can set up multiple accounts with different layers of permissions and hand them out — no action necessary by the people who want to see my private stuff.
Flickr should adopt a similar methodology. If you know the assigned password, you can view my private photos. No Yahoo/Flickr account necessary.
3) Account-less print ordering
Flickr’s print ordering is flat-out amazing. Easily the most impressive online ordering system of anything, let alone photos. It’s too bad that for most of my friends/family, this is a feature that’s hidden. That’s because in order to order prints — in order to even see the order prints button — you need to be signed in to a Flickr account. In order to more easily impress the masses, the order prints button should be made available (perhaps I can configure this) to everyone. Then, all they need is a credit card to place an order — again, no Yahoo/Flickr account necessary.
4) Turn-offable contacts feature and fake-friend feature
This is a feature that’s not like the others. I don’t think it’s necessary for adoption by the masses, but it is something that I’ve always wanted. Like most social-software applications, Flickr has a concept of contacts and “friends”. Also like most social-software applications, being added as someone’s contact or friend bestows on you some extra functionality — in Flickr’s case, if you’re my contact, your new photos show up in my Contacts feed. If you’re my friend, I can see your private photos, and vice-versa.
And like the piece of social-software that we call life, dealing with people who think they’re you’re friend, but aren’t, is… awkward. In real life, if that friend of a friend, or coworker, that you don’t really like invites you over for dinner, or wants to hit a bar, you can always make up an excuse. But in the social-software world, things are more binary. If he/she sends you a friend request, it’s either yes or no.
What Flickr, and other applications like it, need is some sort of “fake-friend” feature. That way, if someone requests to be your friend, but it would be awkward to turn them down, you can mark them as a fake friend. To them, it would look like they’re your friend, but it would not be reciprocal. In the case of Flickr, their photos would not show up in my Contacts feed (because I’m not interested in seeing them) and they would not be able to see my private photos (they wouldn’t even know I had any, so they wouldn’t know what they’re missing).
And in order to make Flickr more palatable to people who just want a place to upload and share family photos, and don’t want to have to deal with random contact and friend requests, why not make that whole system an option that can be turned on and off?
As you can see, a lot of these have to do with not requiring accounts for various pieces of functionality. There’s nothing wrong with accounts, per se, but they do often get in the way of people just trying out your service. Especially in instances where certain features… certain amazing features… are completely hidden from users just because they don’t have accounts, they can be incredibly detrimental to massive adoption of your application.
Flickr has built what is hands down one of the most impressive web applications to come out in a very long time, and they deserve all the praise and awards they have gotten. Even if they stopped innovating and adding features, Flickr would still stand tall among all competition. But with some additional features, like the ones I’ve suggested and many others that I haven’t thought of, Flickr would be well on the way to accomplishing their mission of changing the world.
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