Flickr is an online photo-sharing website that was created in 2004. It rapidly became one of the most appreciated sites of this genre on the Internet and is currently home to roughly 4 billion user-uploaded photographs. At the time of its release, one of the main differences between Flickr and its competitors was it’s ability to tag pictures. This feature enabled users to “attach” information about the content of the picture to the image itself. Consequently pictures could then be organized, categorized or searched by theme.
While the site’s success is unquestionable, I’d like to concentrate on a feature that I find truly astonishing. Flickr has created a page that tracks the most interesting photos uploaded to its site during the past 7 days. While many sites track popularity I know very little that actually track interestingness. It is exceedingly important to note the difference between these two words. While the first is defined by the oxford dictionary as something that is “supported by many people”, the later is defined as something that has the ability to “excite curiosity and hold attention”. In this sense, popularity could be attributed to any picture that has a high amount of views, but this certainly won’t guarantee that it will be interesting. Something that is interesting will have the ability to create conversations, to make people think, to spark research and analyses, to bring people back multiple times and plain simply to get people involved around the subject.
To locate interest, Flickr goes through multiple steps which are remarkably well explained by Jeff Jarvis in his book What Would Google Do? He states: “Flickr measures the interactions-commenting, emailing, tagging, linking-that occur around a photo.” He continues to explain that Flickr then performs a “reverse social analysis: If Bob and Sally are emailing and commenting on each other’s photos all the time, the system presumes they are relatives or friends (…) But if out of nowhere, Bob interacts with Jim’s picture, the system then presumes that their relationship is based on the photo, not on life.” The system can therefore distinguish if certain people are more prone to comment on certain photos than others and consequently gives greater value to the anomalies. This truly brilliant process helps them determine what deserves to be seen by the many, consequently letting them share this exciting content with the masses. As Jeff Jarvis so eloquently states: “Flickr is algorithmically aggregating the aesthetic of the crowd.”
Such features help Flickr distinguish itself from its competition and to me put it miles in front of the others. It also demonstrates a smart use of readily available data. They have access to all the information necessary to create such a feature, so they took advantage of it and offered an extra feature to their users and to the masses. I strongly encourage you to visit this section of their site. It has successfully provided me attractive and noteworthy content on multiple occasions in the past.
