Results tagged “flickr”

"Inspired by Anil", Originally uploaded by heather.

I'm very proud to have had my ill-tempered coinage of "User Generated Discontent" inspire Heather Champ's new t-shirt. From my keyboard to, uh, your chest, powered by disgruntled users.

This one's sublime: "What's your favorite kitchen sound?"

This one's the truth, finally. The most eloquent dismissal of User Generated Discontent (or in this case, nominal competitor-generated discontent) yet written:

It does, however, drive me nuts that you guys clearly take the influence and then blast us every chance you get...[T]he slamming, hyping up the dreams ... none of that is necessary. It's destructive. And what you don't seem to get is that it doesn't even help you at all...

One of my personal missions in life is to help people express themselves creatively because I think that the expression of human creativity is one of the things that gives purpose to the universe. In one sense, I think that's what we're here for. And that mission applies to you two as well.

You hear that, kids? Intellectual dishonesty doesn't pay! I couldn't have articulated it better myself, even when I tried to.

This one's just for me -- Prince: Perfumer, Macy's Shopper, and Verizon Subscriber. This may be the very first time Pitchfork's ever made something I had even a vague interest in reading.

This one's a shame: Brittney Gilbert leaves "Nashville is Talking". The pioneer of bringing traditional local media into the brave new world of social media has had enough of the bullshit. Brittney Gilbert found herself the victim of stupidity for highlighting someone else's stupidity on a TV stations' blog. While some of the User Generated Malcontents might see this as a victory, I've learned from experience that's better to take care of one's own sanity than to try to prove that you're tough enough to withstand an angry mob.

This one is still the one-and-only manual that can explain exactly how to get a number one single.

And then this is fair warning that next week is all about mangoes, minus some diversions into Best of LOL.

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search.

Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I'm supposed to say "Wow, cool! Nice work, Google!" But because I work with Michael, we are often each other's toughest critics -- we want the stuff we do to not suck, and try to structure as much of our work as possible in a way that prevents the sucking. So my initial response wasn't positive. My gut feeling was "Why the hell aren't they charging for this? That sucks!"

Here's the thing -- I don't care about whether Google makes money on 411 services or not. They're going to do billions of dollars worth of AdWords sales regardless, and even if this new service becomes a huge hit, the revenues would just be a drop in the bucket. Certainly not enough to affect the overall direction of the company.

But having paying customers (or the equivalent -- something to indicate users were invested) would help focus the product team. This is Google, which means you've got enormous resources behind you if you're launching a product, both financially and intellectually. If your product "may not be available at all times and may not work for all users" (as it says on the product's homepage), then either fix it or get yelled at by angry users. Either one is a good option. Don't hide behind a "well, shucks, we said it was beta, and it's free..." excuse. Being accountable to your users makes your product better.

What's worse is the uncritical evaluations of new technologies. I don't care if an individual product or feature seems cool if it's just going to go away in a few months when the company folds. See The starting line is not the finish line:

I am, frankly, tired of reading reviews of new technology that omit the commitment of the team, that don't mention how the success of the product almost feels like life-or-death to the people making it, or ones that ignore the people who make the damn thing happen.

If we aspire to making meaningful technology (and if you don't, then please, just quit now), then it's irresponsible to let users become connected to, and perhaps even emotionally invested in, a tool that isn't going to be around for the long haul. If nothing else, it's a waste of someone's precious time to use a small company's tool that's evaporates because a big company found it trivial to clone, or because a big company decided it was too hard to charge what a product was worth. I don't believe AdWords will subsidize Voice Local Search indefinitely any more than I believed Windows 95 would subsidize MSN Sidewalk indefinitely, even though that was a fantastic online local guide product as well.

And connecting people via VOIP or sending them an SMS, two of the key features of the new service, cost money. At Google volumes, they cost a lot of money. I want to have a service I can rely on -- which again means I need to invest in it. I understand that the idea here is for this product team to use a beta test as a starting point to make the service more reliable, but the sad reality is that a line has been crossed where there's no sense of urgency or expectation that those actual launch days ever arrive.

Google's made the leap here before, by starting to charge for Google Apps. Even people who use the service for free were reassured by the fact there was a paid version. So there is still the opportunity to be brave enough again to assert that a product is worth paying for, even paying a premium for. Millions of iPod users are willing to listen to the argument.

This, I think, is the crux of the problem that David Galbraith highlighted on his site. David's is one of my few must-read blogs; I don't always share his tone of righteous indignation, but I love that a person who's often so reserved in person can be so passionate online. David mentions that new efforts by Google or Yahoo (see Google My Maps vs. Plazes, or Yahoo Alpha vs. Rollyo) can kneecap some Web 2.0 startups en passant, and posits that this is the death knell for Web 2.0. Leaving aside whether that's oversimplifying the efforts of those startups, it's an attractive argument just for the sheer audacity of his phrasing.

But that sort of reckoning is not the death of Web 2.0, that's it's promise. It's very possible to build a successful business and thrive while competing with Google and Yahoo, even in an established market. (Oh hey, that's my day job.) What's not possible is to make a business without adding significant value to the platforms provided by existing companies. This is, roughly, exactly what distinguishes current successful business models from Web 1.0.

Or, put more succinctly, I like paying for Flickr Pro. Like us at Six Apart, the Flickr team was lucky enough to start working on their company, and on Game Neverending, back before there really was AdSense to run on your site, and when virtually the only small startup charging money for a consumer web service was Oddpost. I'd argue those sorts of innovations are as important as all the Ajax work that either of those companies ever did, even though I admire and respect both teams tremendously.

This refrain never goes away, but it bears repeating. Those of us who love technology and believe in its potential owe it to our communities, our audiences, and our customers to make our efforts sustainable and accountable. I'm not an unabashed, uncritical capitalist, but I do recognize that one of the most positive effects that a classic charge-a-fair-market-value-for-your-goods business model offers is the opportunity to create an accountable and sustainable relationship with a customer.

I pay for a lot of products because it gives me the potential opportunity (though I almost never use it) to yell at someone when it breaks. I pay for a lot of other services because I want to make sure they don't go away, or they're not forced to make ugly choices about privacy or ethics in order to keep the lights on. And I am glad to use services or sites that are ad-supported when it's made explicit that the advertising is supporting a useful good or service.

If you believe in what you're doing, in technology or anything else in your life, make a commitment that it's here to stay. Do what it takes to prove it. Do what it takes to sustain it. And if it's the kind of service that you think is okay to just give up on, or that you don't want to bother to figure out a way to keep running, then why are you doing it in the first place?

A couple Clay Shirky links for you today, one of which I just linked to, one of which I should have linked to last week, and all worth reading.

• In Defense of Ready, Fire Aim, a piece Clay wrote for the Harvard Business Review's list of breakthrough ideas for 2007. I really am a sucker for the Annual Ideas Lists that more and more publications are putting out, but a few of the items in this list seem particularly valuable. I linked to Clay's essay in yesterday's post about Yahoo Pipes, referring to his concept of open source being based on a principal of embracing failure:

In open systems, by contrast, the cost of failure is reduced, partly because less coordination is required among the various players and partly because each player is willing to accept some of the risks of failure directly. This means that worrying about whether a new idea will succeed is unnecessary; you simply try it out. The institutional barrier between thought and action—the need to convince someone that your idea is worth giving a whirl—doesn’t exist. The low cost of trying means that participants can fail like crazy as they continue to build on their successes.

In systems where anyone can try anything, the good has to be filtered from the bad after the fact. The cost of trying to prevent bloggers from saying stupid or silly things, for example, would be high, whereas the cost of allowing anyone to publish anything is low.

• A Clay Classic: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. I was actually at the Etech conference where Clay delivered this speech; Stewart and Ben had just debuted Flickr a short while earlier, and the application was (at that point) a weird Flash community application that could do some image stuff in addition to working as an IM gateway. Clay was talking about group behaviors as exhibited on LiveJournal and The WELL and MetaFilter, with his points being especially relevant after the recent Yahoo logins hubbub on Flickr.

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

This passage is especially resonant after the launch of Pipes:

We've gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we're getting platform stuff. We're getting RSS. We're getting shared Flash objects. We're getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly.

I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. [Speaking of Flickr.] I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly. It's not that you couldn't have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher. And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.

• A response to Henry Jenkins about Second Life. Clay has been taking a much-needed hard look at Second Life for some time, but I really am just linking to this because, as a student of social communication technology, Clay is uniquely qualified to create howlingly funny and yet still somehow polite and refined jabs at his debate partners. It's like the world's most dignified flame war. Witness:

You compare Second Life with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. This is approximately insane, and your disclaimer that Second Life may not reach this rarefied plateau doesn’t do much to make it less insane. Using the Renaissance as a reference point links the two in the reader’s mind, even in the face of subsequent denial.

• And then finally, as Andre started experimenting with Arduino (film at 11!), who should pop up as the author of the source code for the Dimming LEDs tutorial but one Mr. Clay Shirky:

/*
* Code for cross-fading 3 LEDs, red, green and blue, or one tri-color LED, using PWM
* The program cross-fades slowly from red to green, green to blue, and blue to red
* The debugging code assumes Arduino 0004, as it uses the new Serial.begin()-style functions
* Clay Shirky <clay.shirky@nyu.edu> 
*/

// Output
int redPin   = 9;   // Red LED,   connected to digital pin 9
int greenPin = 10;  // Green LED, connected to digital pin 10
int bluePin  = 11;  // Blue LED,  connected to digital pin 11

// Program variables
int redVal   = 255; // Variables to store the values to send to the pins
int greenVal = 1;   // Initial values are Red full, Green and Blue off
int blueVal  = 1;

int i = 0;     // Loop counter    
int wait = 50; // 50ms (.05 second) delay; shorten for faster fades
int DEBUG = 0; // DEBUG counter; if set to 1, will write values back via serial

(Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the image.)

I've seen a lot of weird, very belated, hand-wringing about Flickr requiring early adopter users to sign in with their Yahoo accounts. This is prompted, I understand, by those users having gotten an email letting them know about the required change.

Now, I was a very early Flickr user, and as soon as they got acquired by Yahoo and we were all told we'd have to migrate, I did so. I am pretty sure that at least 99% of early Flickr users already have a Yahoo login somewhere. So clearly, an unwillingness to have a Yahoo account is probably not the cause of any recalcitrance.

I have seen one well-articulated objection: There are few user benefits that result from the migration. But, now that Flickr Mobile works with Yahoo logins, there aren't any features lost when making the transition. One could argue the message about the transition could have been written differently, but that's surely splitting hairs, isn't it?

It's been more than a year since this change was announced, with a firm timetable set and well-communicated. It's a tiny (though admittedly vocal and valuable) minority of users who are affected. And this is not, to quote some of the inaccurate adjectives being thrown around "sudden" or a "surprise". Any information that users are afraid of Yahoo having is clearly already available to the company, since the servers are all hosted in the same place and connected together -- this is just a formality. Frankly, I watch online communities a lot and am only rarely baffled by the vagaries of mob justice. But this one has me stumped.

One other note, I have generally positive feelings about all the various photo sharing sites out there -- the ability to build community online through shared experiences is a powerful thing. But I can not and will not ever concede that using these sorts of opportunities to promote a competing business is cool. And I take some consolation in the fact that, as upset as people get, almost all of the threats to take one's ball photos and go home end up being mostly empty threats, designed to express some weird emotional desire that I really wish I could understand.

• "Two of the most financially successful Web 2.0 personalities ... are rooting for the financial failure of their competitors." Hmm. I tend to root for the success of our company's competitiors, because I want the entire industry to be healthy, I think the competition is good for all of us, and because I actually give a damn about the web. I'm not sure if I believe the sentiment that's quoted above, but I do know there are lots of people who take digs at their competitors or wish them ill. In the long term, this is a self-correcting problem. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

• On a not-entirely-unrelated note, congratulations, Jason. A break is well-deserved, and a lot of what Mena said about Ev applies here as well.

• What's it look like after people have rooted for your failure but you make it work anyway? It looks like a WSJ profile of marca. I remember being in high school and my Morrissey-listening friends would tell me they would hate it if I became successful.

• 
  What was that about successful friends? Dear Flickr team: Did you know the official Justin Timberlake SexyBack Tour Photo Contest happens to run as a Flickr photo group? I'm also pretty entertained by the cover of the new album, FutureSex / LoveSounds, which is pictured here. (See also: my earlier review of SexyBack, the lead single.)

• The other kids aren't listening to Justin Timberlake, they're listening to Kelly Clarkson! So says the wildly erratic Google Music Trends, which relies on the apparently completely unreliable "Now Playing" status of Google Talk to determine song popularity.

• Want to talk to Google Talk users without using Google's system at all? For free? Using open source software? Hmm, that sounds interesting... Act now and we'll throw in a free Jabber server.

• If you're not sick of me yet, pick up this month's Wired. The story's not online yet, but I talk a bit about spam blogs (as mentioned by Steve Rubel) but come off sounding a little half-witted at points. That's okay.

• And finally, some outstanding conversations have started based on my talk at MeshForum a few months ago. Slouching Toward the Era of Quality of Life, What blogspace needs now and Audience and purpose in blogging all delighted me with the great ideas that seemed to come from these bloggers thinking out loud on their sites. I like it when my ideas' competitors succeed.

I enjoy links myself, so I thought you might want some too. Here, then:

• Graphs as art: Werner Vogels picks up the site graph meme with some nice visualizations of Amazon and A9.

• Knowing enough to be dangerous: Bad advice about Windows tweaking, debunked by Dr. Jason, who's never happier than when he's correcting misinformation.

• Flickr tag count comparison, where Nelson finds out what doesn't influence interestingness. Highly recommended if you enjoyed infographics about Flickr massages.

• The response to the Mumbai bombings has been rather hushed. Both the attacks and the lack of discussion have been on my mind, Sepia Mutiny covers the topic well.

• Bomani Jones on Prince's best work. I find myself in violent disagreement with the some of the assertions, despite being in complete agreement over the conclusions.

• Tim O'Reilly with four big ideas about open source. Especially compelling to me because, improbably, I'm keynoting (is that a verb?) the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland next week.

• And then, finally, Concerning the platinum bitch. I've been meaning to write a post about Khia for about two years; Stephen beat me to it and now I don't have to.

Speaking of memes from a year ago, last year I created a site called ishavingamassage.com. (That's "Is Having A Massage", not "I Shaving...") The domain is a (gentle) poke at Flickr, which uses the message "Flickr is having a massage." as its error/downtime message when the service is taken offline for repairs or maintenance.

The founders and several of the members of the Flickr team are friends of mine, so it wasn't intended by any means to be a dig at the site. (Except maybe for being so lighthearted and cheerful while so many Flickr addicts are panickedly hitting "refresh".)

At any rate, the massage site had a nice little run for a few months. It acted as a goofy inline link for people to use when making a point in a blog post, or as a little toy for people who like to kill downtime at work by typing in different URLs and seeing what happens. You know, something like yo.momma. ishavingamassage.com.

How it works

For those who've never tried it, the behavior is simple. You type in your.site.ishavingamassage.com into your browser, and it displays a custom Massage Message, coloring the text of the your.site part of the address Flickr-style, converting any dots in the URL to spaces, and removing a penultimate "e" character if the last letter of the site name is an "r". Not rocket science, but it amused me for the hour or so it took to build.

On a lark, I decided to log the massages after the first hour or so that the site was running. I didn't keep track of timestamps or the IP addresses of people who accessed the site or anything else that might start people fussing about privacy, etc. If I'd have planned ahead, I probably would have thought more about that.

Anyway, the amount of analysis and actual understanding of user behavior that I can do is limited. What becomes clear is that some popular sites really encourage people to click on links, and others that seem equally popular are mostly frequented by people who are less active clickers. Note, I also special-cased one or two websites where the site owners took down their websites entirely and redirected all of their traffic to sitename.ishavingamassage.com. Those sites were bounced to google.com and the requests weren't logged, due to volume. Those are removed from the data set.

The Data

Thanks to Ben, I was able to crunch the numbers a bit about what things people were massaging. The Top 10:

1. kottke: 6843
2. flickr: 6412
3. jasmeet: 5187
4. yanni: 3422
5. upcoming: 3012
6. my wallet: 2065
7. aelki: 1831
8. mathowie: 1495
9. brice: 888
10. arvind: 854

If you're looking for raw data, I've got the log file here: massages.txt (750k plain text file). We've also got the raw data of counts, as an Excel file. massages.xls (839k Excel spreadsheet). All of this data is from approximately one month ago; There's a live data feed, but I'll link to that later.

The bottom line

So, what conclusions can we draw? Jason Kottke is a very popular blogger. And the audience that responds to this kind of web wankery has a fairly high percentage of people who like to try at least some primitive-level hacking. There were a surprising (to me, at least) number of people trying to escape characters or add commands to the script that runs the page, along with a healthy number of people who just wanted to mess up the HTML on the page. There are also a surprising number of people who want to redirect all their traffic to another site for at least a temporary period of time.

Not surprising? Lots of people like to talk about body parts belonging either to themselves, their friends, or various people's mothers.

Some items that might be of interest:

• Flickr has far fewer massages these days; To understand why, please see Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Web Sites. Cal's on the Flickr team, and reveals a lot of his secrets here.
• Rafe Colburn says "Log it, don't count it". He's completely correct.
• The massage site didn't originally have ads on it. I put them on now since I believe you should start paying rent after you graduate.
• I got through this whole post without mentioning power laws or the Long Tail! Aw, crap.

Like many great social software applications, Flickr began its life as something else. Flickr was built on a platform for a game called Game Neverending, which had a lot of great features including an in-game economy based on exchanging various totems that had different relative values. There was really only a barter economy, which left the "innate" value of any individual item to be pretty opaque.

Today, Flickr has interestingness, which is a measure of some combination of how many times a picture has been viewed, how many comments it has, how many times it's been tagged or marked as a favorite, and some other special sauce. I suppose revealing the exact mix would encourage even more people to game the system, but the fact that it's not disclosed has led to a number of attempts to reverse-engineer the system. I doubt any of them are/will be successful (Flickr can update/evolve fast enough to change the algorithm if they figure it out) but that's probably going to be an ongoing dialogue.

When I think of things getting gamed, I think of Clay Shirky saying "social software is stuff that gets spammed". So maybe economies are things that get gamed.

What I'm wondering is, how is Flickr's interestingness different than the economy in Game Neverending? Than Second Life? (Or in Evercrack or Neverwinter or any of the other gaming platforms.) Is interestingness its own reward? Why don't I get to level up or power up when I create something interesting?

More to the point, the in-game economies of these games translate pretty cleanly into real-world cash, with eBay amplifying the efficiency of the currency conversion. And interestingness in other online media (like blogs) is rewarded by cash in a pretty straightforward way; I can sign up for TypePad, check a box to enable text ads, and pay for my account or point the proceeds to my PayPal account when I start getting lots of visitors.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

So does that mean the right answer for cashing in on my interesting work is to ask for a penny from Yahoo? Or does it mean I should just make an automated script that grabs my interesting photos and posts them to my TypePad blog so that I can put ads on them?