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7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

July 10 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Simon Curran, 2Picture, k00pa and 151 other people liked this

My friend Robert Scoble has a blog post out talking about the reasons why FriendFeed is not seeing the sort of growth that Twitter and Facebook are. Personally I consider FriendFeed to be a vastly superior platform to both Facebook and Twitter, but it is interesting noting that it does not seem to be getting the traction of these other services. That said, I think that there is a huge opportunity for FriendFeed to better engage a very large existing community that is Flickr and to offer power user sort of tools for Flickr’s most active users. I’ve already written in the past about how I think the existing version of FriendFeed represents a superior way for people to browse Flickr than Flickr itself, but I think that FriendFeed could go a lot further and could definitely attract more (and super active) Flickr users if they improved things even more. So this list represents seven ways that I think FriendFeed could build a better way to engage with the Flickr Community. It should be... more... - Thomas Hawk

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I gave up browsing Flickr when I found FriendFeed well over a year ago. I have many, many groups for browsing photography on FriendFeed. In particular my Flickr Photography group: http://friendfeed.com/flickr-... - Kol Tregaskes

Agree about importing your Flickr contacts, been asking for that for eons. Similar request for importing non-FF Twitter friends would be cool too. I've manually added my favourite Flickr photographers, a chore, so an automated feature would be most welcome. - Kol Tregaskes

Freind Feed is great at being Freind Feed and Flickr is great at being Flickr - Kevin J Hatton

Quick tip if you do import your Flickr streams as a custom RSS into FF, use Ivan's Feed-Buster: http://feed-buster.appspot.com/ to get larger thumbnails. - Kol Tregaskes

Kevin I disagree. Both are great services for what they are. But Flickr no longer innovates. They are a static service sort of on autopilot. There's a need for power users to grow beyond what Flickr currently offers and fortunately Flickr has a robust API where these users can flock to things like greasemonkey scripts and FriendFeed to improve their Flickr experience. People like Kol... more... - Thomas Hawk

Agree with point 6 too. That would be cool. Also the ability to separate Flickr user's favourites and their own photos would be most welcome. I like to have a group for each separately. - Kol Tregaskes

I actually wish FF would not import Flickr photos in batches. They wouldn't do that with any other kind of imported media, and I think it makes it difficult to have any sort of engaging discussion around photos on FriendFeed. - Michael Hocter

how would you suggest they import flickr photos instead Michael? - Thomas Hawk

Point 7 sounds interesting. The saved searches are OK but the Best of Day/Week/Month feature would be great for this if it worked on searches. - Kol Tregaskes

One at a time, just like they do any other feed item. I understand why this would be a pain for Flickr favorites and people who post in huge batches at a time, but most of us only post a few photos at a time. - Michael Hocter

I like being able to see the Flickr favorites of other FFers since I find new and interesting Flickr users that way, much more than I do through Flickr itself. I don't mind having them come in batches. A particularly interesting photograph can always be given its own post. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Michael, I'm OK with that, what annoys me though is when it imports a batch, you go fave more then it reimports them and removes the old import with all the comments and likes. I'd like to fave a batch of pics, force a redresh, then fave some more then force another refresh and have both these come in as separate batches. - Kol Tregaskes

I guess I think showing photos one at a time would be super noisy. For someone like me who imports about 300 photos into Flickr a week this would mean 300 separate entries on FriendFeed. I think that would detract from the overall FF user interface and experience. I think they are doing the batch posting fine now, but it's just that they are doing it backwards and opposite of how flickr shows photos on Flickr. - Thomas Hawk

Michael, use an RSS feed of your stream with he Feed-Buster service, that's exactly what you're after. - Kol Tregaskes

Having Flickr photos come one at a time would be really annoying, at least for me. It would crowd out everything else in my feeds. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Thomas, like my stream from vi.sualizue.us? ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

Another feature I'd like: In search, I wish I could separate Flickr uploads from Flickr favorites. I prefer to talk to the people who actually take and upload the photos, but when you search, the majority of photos you see are from Flickr favorites. - Michael Hocter

Kol, your vi.sualizue.us stream rocks! - Thomas Hawk

Michael, agree. I've never been able to separate the two. - Kol Tregaskes

Hehe, thanks Thomas. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Michael I agree with that idea as well. I think maybe the two can be one by default, but give users an option to split them if they want. I'd much rather be able to view the two independently. - Thomas Hawk

As the open version of Facebook, Ff needs to develop these relationships and fast. Facebook wants you to use their picture storage, their blog engines, their music addons, keeping you inside the Facebook walls. Ff just as Thomas says, NEEDS to show that they can build something better by letting everyone decide which stand alone services serve their needs best, and all these can be... more... - Matthew DeVries

@Michael - yes! I prefer to know which are faves and which are posts. - JA Castillo

There are many ways FF could be improved to help us photo-happy people (and most features would benefit the community in general), such as the ability to search for entries with pictures *only* (on it's way I believe), search by date/time, be able to search by selective imported feeds, e.g. I cannot search for my vi.sualize.us images only, etc. - Kol Tregaskes

FF could even go further and let you sign into flickr and then you can like and comment and it flows back to flickr - Phill Price

hear hear Phill - Thomas Power

It would be pretty slick if I could hover over a photo on FF and fave it on flickr. I think that would take more than basic API stuff though. - Thomas Hawk

@Phill - that would be too much!! I would never leave FF! :) - JA Castillo

For me, FriendFeed needs to improve for new users. For instances the suggested users list is not the way to go and the lack of introduction to the service's features upon registration is virtually non-existent. When a new user has completed registration it needs a quick and simple Flash anim to demonstrate FF's basic features (an adapted version of one of Ross' videos would be cool),... more... - Kol Tregaskes

Faving a Flickr photo on FF would be super!! - Kol Tregaskes

JA, exactly. ;-) But that lies the problem, Flickr perhaps wouldn't want that? - Kol Tregaskes

The suggested users list on FF definitely needs to incorporate activity and not just popularity. That's a whole other subject though. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, yep. Sorry going off in all directions. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

I suspect Flickr could be resistant to some of these ideas. After all, attention on the internet is a zero sum game and making FF that much better for hardcore flickr users could siphon off traffic from them. Still, I bet a bunch of this could be done through the API as it stands now. - Thomas Hawk

I prefer to see at least a medium-sized version of a photo before I fave it, so I doubt I would fave through FF if such an option existed. Agreed with most of Thomas's seven suggestions. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

John, yep, bigger versions of the pics are needed, would that watch in the current batches? - Kol Tregaskes

bigger versions would indeed rock. It would be nice to have a user setting though to either see small thumbnail photos are larger photos. This way the people who are not as interested in the photos as some of us could still choose to see them small. In fact small should probably be the default with a user option to view them larger instead. - Thomas Hawk

I kind of like the thumbnail batches, and being able to choose which to click through. My comment was specifically about faves – it's hard to pick favorites from just thumbnails. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Another thing I'd like to see changed (or at least be toggleable) is the feature what hides entries under 'more form <service>' on lists. I have lots of photo-related groups in one friends list and having them hidden like this is annoying. Also the hiding of the Flickr photos in the batches is annoying too. Personally I'd like this expanded all the time but a toggle would be nice. I appreciate this might be set-up as it is because of performance. - Kol Tregaskes

Thomas, agree. - Kol Tregaskes

More user options for controlling the display of Flickr photos would be helpful. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

I'm kind of disappointed in Friendfeed. Too much focus on competing with Twitter, and not enough on what was originally the core idea of aggregating services. And sadly they've de-emphasized service integration so much that I wonder if they'll even keep doing it, let alone improve the integration. And Flickr, for that matter, sucks too - Thomas hit the nail on the head above, Flickr has... more... - Eric P

Eric, I think you're right about Flickr. Flickr's mostly been laying people off these days. They laid off designer George Oates, Engineer Rev Dan Catt, and lots of the other original talent there has left, Cal Henderson, Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Kakul Srivastava recently left the helm of the site as well to work on other things at Yahoo. The last innovative thing that they... more... - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, thanks for taking the time to write this up - Bret Taylor

Bret, you're welcome. I think you guys have the best opportunity to drive a lot more Flickr users over here. - Thomas Hawk

Love the new logo, lol - Zachary TG

Hey TH, as always, great ideas from you about improving FriendFeed. I've always felt it's a great adjunct to Flickr. Personally, my social community isn't here (can't get them to join), so FF isn't as useful for me as I'd like it to be (or as it is for people like you and Scoble, etc). Friendbinder is what I've been using to navigate my Flickr contacts (it auto-pulls them all in, and... more... - Criz

Hey Criz, thanks. I'd obviously love to see more innovation via flickr come through FF and especially directly at flickr. Good to know that you guys are working on more than just new buttons. In terms of hiring, the only hire that I'm aware of Flickr announcing in the last year or so (unless I missed it somewhere) was zycster in the "abuse" "customer care" "censorship" bureau vs. the... more... - Thomas Hawk

I still think Google Reader is the most convenient way of browsing Flickr photostreams. I'm testing Feedly for this at the moment and it's doing a quite good job as well. - Rutger Blom

Thomas, film was quite a big new feature on Flickr too. - Rutger Blom

Rutger, I suppose, adding video was a feature, unfortunately though I think that it was a feature at odds with the flickr community that many in the community saw as more of a negative than a positive. There was a pretty strong and vocal group opposing adding video on Flickr. I've only ever used video on Flickr once (ironically yesterday). Here again, videos are crippled to 90 seconds... more... - Thomas Hawk

I think FF on the other hand has offered us already fairly substantive improvements to the Flickr experience. Being able to see *all* of your flickr contact's photos vs. only the most recent 1 or 5 is huge. So is letting us see our contacts faves. Ideally though we'd get continued innovation from both Flickr AND outside developers like FF building on the Flickr API to best improve the... more... - Thomas Hawk

Yes, but the seeing *all* of your flickr contact's photos can be accomplished in any RSS feed reader really. Has little to do with FriendFeed. - Rutger Blom

Thomas, I am zyrcster, and I am not on abuse :) And I think you'll enjoy what's coming down the pike. I hope so, anyway. - Criz

Ah, ok, zyrcster. Hopefully it's something good. I thought you were part of the moderation/customer service / abuse/ censorship dept based on the thread in flickr help. I should re-read that thread. Hard to know who's who on the flickr staff when flickr codes the public "about flickr" staff page to purposely hide staff members from me personally. I hope that coding project didn't take much time away from all that innovation going on over there. - Thomas Hawk from iPhone

Rutger, Flickr RSS feeds only contain public, "safe" photos... definitely not all of my contacts' photos - Michael Hocter

Hmm, never knew that, there should be 2 versions of the feed then so we can choose. - Kol Tregaskes

In fact, I can't even get a decent RSS feed of my own photos out of Flickr because many of them are not "safe" - Michael Hocter

Or is there an issue from Flickr's point of perspective having such content go outside it's site? - Kol Tregaskes

Kol, I think it's because they can't authenticate who you are or what your preferences are through RSS - Michael Hocter

I see. They could have a password protection/authenticated feed but FF doesn't support such feeds. - Kol Tregaskes

LOL, Mrsth, that's over censoring stuff! - Kol Tregaskes

that is actually a problem on Flickr's end. They've been censoring your RSS feed now for years. They won't allow any content deemed "adult" to be sent out of Flickr via RSS. It's incredibly stupid in my opinion. I'd love to be able to subscribe to Merkely's nudes (which very much are fine art) for instance and even though I've checked on Flickr that I'm an adult and want adult content... more... - Thomas Hawk

haha, actually Kol that was me. I was accidentally logged in as my wife though, just got home and was using the home computer. - Thomas Hawk

What happened there? Posting from your wife's acount? ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

Ah, hehe!! - Kol Tregaskes

Now the thread reads oddly. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

Kol, I don't know about you, but I really wish vi.sualize.us would implement FF's SUP or FF spider those streams more often. I end up having to manually get FF to pull them in after I've favorited a bunch or it takes *forever* for them to finally be pulled into the FF stream. - Mark Philpot

I've not really checked my vi.sualize.us groups, is there a delay in importing? - Kol Tregaskes

you certainly can easily add a photo as a favourite through the api - all you need is the photo id and the user to have given ff a token by signing in... http://www.flickr.com/service... - Phill Price

Ah, I did have an issue with my watchlist from vi.sualize.us. I notified them and they checked it and it started working. Are you having problems, Mark? - Kol Tregaskes

How recent was this? I've just been in the habit of manually refreshing my vi.sualize.us feed. Next time I'll try letting FF get it on it's own and see how long it takes. - Mark Philpot

Mark, a few weeks ago. I'd buzz them on their site and let them know you are having problems too. Works fine for me atm but they said they are keeping an eye on it. - Kol Tregaskes

BTW, people on this thread might be interested in this group for vi.sualize.us most popular entries feed: http://friendfeed.com/visuali.... It seems to import dups a lot, which is a problem but it's not a huge issue. - Kol Tregaskes

So I can now check vi.sualize.us on FF too. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

Thomas, could probably do something similar for your Zooomr too. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

I just added six to my vi.sualize.us favorites... I'll see how long it takes for them to get imported. -- And a note to any FF developers on this feed -- Please implement a "Comment" link at the bottom of the comments. Especially for long comment streams, it's a pain to have to scroll up to the top to add a new comment. - Mark Philpot

Mark, OK, any issue go to the vi.sualize.us, they'll help you out. It's their feed after all. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

If you authenticate with the Flickr API you can get at the "unsafe" photos, FYI. But that would require a deeper level of integration that Friendfeed offers today. - Eric P

Michael, I think that's quite logical and good actually. All hell would break loose if Flickr allowed access to porn via its feeds. The solution is authenticated RSS feeds in case things would stop working all together here at FriendFeed if you are not creating an imaginary friend for every Flickr contact that is. - Rutger Blom

+1 faving a Flickr photo on FriendFeed - Thierry R. Andriamirado

FF is not seeing the growth other services are seeing because it is not designed for the casual, non-technical user the way flickR, Twitter, and Facebook are. An average person can "walk up" to any of those three services and get them almost immediately. By "get them" I don't mean that they understand deeply/optimally how or why to use them but that they can readily get their heads... more... - Anthony Citrano

I think even for a lot of above average users FriendFeed is too obscure. - Rutger Blom from email

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