7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community

Posted on July 10, 2009, 8:18 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Flickr, FriendFeed.

7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community

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 noted that FriendFeed certainly is not, nor I’m sure wants to be, a replacement for the Flickr community. Rather I see FriendFeed as a way for power users to get even more out of Flickr than they already get today.

I should also note that I’m not 100% sure exactly how many of these features could be implemented via the Flickr API but know that the Flickr API is somewhat robust and would think that some of the items below might be possible.

1. Exponentially more important than anything else FriendFeed could do in relation to Flickr (and my current number one FriendFeed feature request), I think FriendFeed should allow an option to import all of your Flickr contacts into FriendFeed like they currently do with your Twitter and Facebook contacts. I know that there are people on FriendFeed who are my Flickr contacts that I’m not presently following. I know that they are out there and would follow them if I could. FriendFeed needs to allow you to scan your Flickr account and auto-add any existing Flickr contact as a FriendFeed contact. This seems like very basic FriendFeed/Flickr integration missing today.

2. Allow you to automatically set up imaginary friends in a “Flickr Contacts” specific list for Flickr contacts who are not on FriendFeed yet. This option would ensure that you could get all of your Flickr contacts photos over to FriendFeed which represents a superior way to browse your contact’s photos as it includes more than just the last 1 or 5 of their photos and it also includes their faves. Combined with matching up with your existing joint FriendFeed/Flickr contacts this would represent a complete way to better recreate one of Flickr’s most popular pages the “photos from my contacts” page. Auto subscribing to these RSS should be possible. FriendFeed should take this one step further though by automatically replacing an imaginary friend contact with an actual contact when this person joins FriendFeed.

3. Allow an option on FriendFeed to see when a Flickr contact creates a group thread. This technology is sorely missing at Flickr right now and many times you may have a high value contact start a thread in a Flickr group that you don’t know anything about. You miss an entire conversation. By creating a FriendFeed entry to coincide with every contact’s new group post on Flickr you would be notified when this happens and you could then go to that group thread to participate. The top 10% of Flickr users represent a disproportionate amount of Flickr’s traffic. These users are the ones that are most engaged in the groups on Flickr. Groups are where the truly hardcore Flickr users live. By adding this functionality on FriendFeed you’d be creating a tremendous tool currently lacking at Flickr that would engage many people who are 24/7 type web junkies on Flickr.

4. FriendFeed currently gets the Flickr RSS feed wrong. For a while they were presenting it correctly but not for the past few months. On Flickr, hardcore users that post photos there are very cognizant of the order that they post their photos in. Because Flickr only shows your contacts the last 1 or 5 photos, Flickr users generally make sure that when they do a batch upload that their last one or five photos are the best of that batch upload. FriendFeed conversely reports Flickr RSS streams *backwards* — that is they show the first 7 photos uploaded in a batch on your FriendFeed feed *burying* anything beyond that. This means that the photos that I am showing on Flickr as my best in any batch upload are buried 100% of the time on FriendFeed. That’s discouraging to Flickr users and since they used to do it correctly before, I’m not sure why they can’t fix that.

5. Flickr mashup searching streams. There are certain images on Flickr that I’m interested in and do regular searches for. graffiti AND sanfrancisco, neon AND california, thomashawk, etc. FriendFeed should figure out a way to build RSS feeds with these searches and then let me create a sort of custom search feed that constantly scours for the subjects that I’m most interested in.

6. Filter by faves. FriendFeed should see if there is a way to create feeds from Flickr based on favoriting activity. I’d love to have a feed for instance that showed me all of my flickr contacts’ photos with 1 fave or more, 5 faves or more, 10 faves or more, etc. You get the idea.

7. Best of Day Flickr. FriendFeed needs a page where they show the “Best of Day” amongst FriendFeed members’ Flickr photos. Flickr’s Explore page is crappy. It’s a subjective page full of blah photos generally speaking. FriendFeed should allow you to filter your Flickr Contacts photos by absolute numbers of faves on a daily basis. I’d love to be able to see my Flickr contact’s daily uploads organized this way.

If you want to follow me on FriendFeed you can follow me here. If you want to follow me on Flickr you can follow me here.

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  • July 10, 2009 at 4:21 pm Thomas Hawk
    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 noted that FriendFeed certainly is not, nor...
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:24 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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-photography
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:24 pm 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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:25 pm Kevin J Hatton
    Freind Feed is great at being Freind Feed and Flickr is great at being Flickr
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:27 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:28 pm Thomas Hawk
    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 and I largely browse Flickr photos via FriendFeed right now. But FriendFeed could improve that experience even more and I think attract the most hardcore Flickr users over here which would be very valuable users for them to attract.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:29 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:29 pm Michael Hocter
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:30 pm Thomas Hawk
    how would you suggest they import flickr photos instead Michael?
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:30 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:31 pm Michael Hocter
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:33 pm John (a.k.a. dendroica)
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:33 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:33 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:33 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Michael, use an RSS feed of your stream with he Feed-Buster service, that's exactly what you're after.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:34 pm John (a.k.a. dendroica)
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:34 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Thomas, like my stream from vi.sualizue.us? ;-)
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:35 pm Michael Hocter
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:36 pm Thomas Hawk
    Kol, your vi.sualizue.us stream rocks!
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:36 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Michael, agree. I've never been able to separate the two.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:36 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Hehe, thanks Thomas. :-)
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:37 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:37 pm Matthew DeVries
    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 aggregated, without walls of Facebook. They need to make the feeds (like flickr) the stars. Start by bringing back the favicons. Let people have to option of making their fed items commentable here, or if they'd prefer the comments be sent to the fed site.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:45 pm JA Castillo
    @Michael - yes! I prefer to know which are faves and which are posts.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:47 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:50 pm Phill Price
    FF could even go further and let you sign into flickr and then you can like and comment and it flows back to flickr
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:51 pm Thomas Power
    hear hear Phill
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:51 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:52 pm JA Castillo
    @Phill - that would be too much!! I would never leave FF! :)
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:52 pm Kol Tregaskes
    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), with perhaps an interactive ending that shows the user how to post and comment something like "Hello, just joined FriendFeed...".
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:52 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Faving a Flickr photo on FF would be super!!
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:53 pm Kol Tregaskes
    JA, exactly. ;-) But that lies the problem, Flickr perhaps wouldn't want that?
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:53 pm Thomas Hawk
    The suggested users list on FF definitely needs to incorporate activity and not just popularity. That's a whole other subject though.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:54 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Thomas, yep. Sorry going off in all directions. ;-)
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:54 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 4:57 pm John (a.k.a. dendroica)
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:04 pm Kol Tregaskes
    John, yep, bigger versions of the pics are needed, would that watch in the current batches?
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:09 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:12 pm John (a.k.a. dendroica)
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:13 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Another thing I'd like to see changed (or at least be toggleable) is the feature what hides entries under 'more form ' 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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:13 pm Kol Tregaskes
    Thomas, agree.
  • July 10, 2009 at 5:23 pm John (a.k.a. dendroica)
    More user options for controlling the display of Flickr photos would be helpful.
  • July 10, 2009 at 6:39 pm Eric P
    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 stopped innovating. I can't remember the last new Flickr feature that was actually something to get excited about - probably way back when they integrated geotagging and maps. And all suggestions to improve their contact system just languish in the Ideas group, unacknowledged by staff. Kind of sucks all around.
  • July 10, 2009 at 7:09 pm Thomas Hawk
    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 did was stats. Today the big news is simply resizing buttons. The only area where they've really expanded staff is in the censorship bureau which is counterproductive if anything. Yahoo has no interest in innovating with Flickr but rather would prefer just to keep the status quo. But... the API is out there and remains a robust and fertile tool for outside developers (like FriendFeed) to work with and there is still lots of innovation possible, likely though just not coming from the current Flickr staff.
  • July 10, 2009 at 7:23 pm Bret Taylor
    Thomas, thanks for taking the time to write this up
  • July 10, 2009 at 7:52 pm Thomas Hawk
    Bret, you're welcome. I think you guys have the best opportunity to drive a lot more Flickr users over here.
  • July 10, 2009 at 7:59 pm Zachary TG
    Love the new logo, lol
  • July 10, 2009 at 8:18 pm Criz
    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 opens Flickr images in lightboxes for ease of browsing... & it also pulls my contacts' faves. Their devs plan on adding support for faving/commenting within their app). I would also like to clarify that I am not on the abuse team at Flickr. I work with Kevin on escalated technical issues (can haz bug fix, plz?). The way you're characterized our recent hiring pattern also isn't accurate, as a few other folks have been picked up who are not on customer care. I hear you about the seeming lack of innovation, but there is stuff going on here besides buttons. ;-) At any rate, awesome FF ideas you have here; your ideas are always a good read.
  • July 10, 2009 at 8:51 pm Thomas Hawk
    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 pretty public departures of some of the seniormost team, Stewart, Cal, George, Rev Dan, Eric, Sergui, Kakul, etc. It's hard for me to get a true sense though since you guys personally coded the public "about flickr" staff page so that it shows different staff to me than to the rest of the world. In terms of innovation, the last serious thing flickr added was stats back in Dec. 2007 (light years away in internet years). You guys did do some minor stuff with contacts I suppose but even that was crippled to not show me people that I list as contacts but who do not list me back. I do very much hope that you guys have some mind blowing stuff coming...
  • July 10, 2009 at 8:52 pm Rutger Blom
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 8:55 pm Rutger Blom
    Thomas, film was quite a big new feature on Flickr too.
  • July 10, 2009 at 9:01 pm Thomas Hawk
    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 only which I think makes them difficult really to use. I've thought about doing some sort of Warholish screen test sorts of things with them but I'd much rather see Flickr innovate around their core competency of photography than to add in new things like 90 second videos. But maybe that's just me.
  • July 10, 2009 at 9:04 pm 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 entire flickr experience. In fact, I love the idea of outside developers even being seen slightly as competition for eyeballs because I think that this helps encourage development and innovation on all fronts.
  • July 10, 2009 at 9:13 pm Rutger Blom
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 10:23 pm Criz
    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.
  • July 10, 2009 at 11:39 pm Thomas Hawk
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:08 am Michael Hocter
    Rutger, Flickr RSS feeds only contain public, "safe" photos... definitely not all of my contacts' photos
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:10 am Kol Tregaskes
    Hmm, never knew that, there should be 2 versions of the feed then so we can choose.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:10 am Michael Hocter
    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"
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:11 am Kol Tregaskes
    Or is there an issue from Flickr's point of perspective having such content go outside it's site?
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:12 am Michael Hocter
    Kol, I think it's because they can't authenticate who you are or what your preferences are through RSS
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:14 am Kol Tregaskes
    I see. They could have a password protection/authenticated feed but FF doesn't support such feeds.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:24 am Kol Tregaskes
    LOL, Mrsth, that's over censoring stuff!
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:24 am Thomas Hawk
    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 they still will not allow me to access RSS feeds that contain adult content. It's crazy what they classify as "adult" as well. I had to fight with them to uncensor a photo of a public statue in the middle of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills because they classified it as "adult." They still have photos of mine taken of paintings in musuems classified as adult because they contain nudity. Of course hundreds if not thousands of children each year visit the museum and see that painting just fine. This is why I've been saying for a while that Flickr needs less people in the censorship bureau and more engineers.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:25 am 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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:25 am Kol Tregaskes
    What happened there? Posting from your wife's acount? ;-)
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:25 am Kol Tregaskes
    Ah, hehe!!
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:26 am Kol Tregaskes
    Now the thread reads oddly. ;-)
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:29 am Mark Philpot
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:31 am Kol Tregaskes
    I've not really checked my vi.sualize.us groups, is there a delay in importing?
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:31 am Phill Price
    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/services/api/flickr.favorites.add.html
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:33 am Kol Tregaskes
    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?
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:36 am Mark Philpot
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:39 am Kol Tregaskes
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:39 am Kol Tregaskes
    BTW, people on this thread might be interested in this group for vi.sualize.us most popular entries feed: http://friendfeed.com/visualizeus-popular. It seems to import dups a lot, which is a problem but it's not a huge issue.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:39 am Kol Tregaskes
    So I can now check vi.sualize.us on FF too. ;-)
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:40 am Kol Tregaskes
    Thomas, could probably do something similar for your Zooomr too. ;-)
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:45 am Mark Philpot
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 12:59 am Kol Tregaskes
    Mark, OK, any issue go to the vi.sualize.us, they'll help you out. It's their feed after all. :-)
  • July 11, 2009 at 2:00 am Eric P
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 5:31 am Rutger Blom
    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.
  • July 11, 2009 at 8:26 am Thierry R. Andriamirado
    +1 faving a Flickr photo on FriendFeed
  • July 11, 2009 at 10:18 pm Anthony Citrano
    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 around the basic how-and-why. FriendFeed is just too obscure for the average user to grok, and I am not sure that is surmountable.
  • July 11, 2009 at 11:35 pm Rutger Blom
    I think even for a lot of above average users FriendFeed is too obscure.

6 Comments

  1. Making Friendfeed Better, Part II | Deep Jive Interests says:
    July 10, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    [...] are utterly entranced by photography-as-art? My bet is on yes.   There are six more ideas … check it out. This entry was written by Tony Hung, posted on July 10, 2009 at 4:50 pm, filed under Friendfeed [...]

  2. clarke thomas says:
    July 10, 2009 at 2:45 pm

    agree on most of your points, but what I’d prefer is to have a bunch of widgets on 1 page; were I could still see the main feed; but also see subfeeds or groups in other tabs or boxes. I think I’m seeing less content now; then in the previous version – mostly due to the feed updating so often.

  3. StevieB’s Shared Items – July 11, 2009 at Lost in Cyberspace says:
    July 11, 2009 at 2:04 am

    [...] 7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr CommunityJuly 10, 2009 [...]

  4. Adam Maas says:
    July 11, 2009 at 4:23 am

    FriendFeed isn’t growing because it is a niche product with next to zero appeal outside of a smallish niche of large-scale social media users.

    If you use a large number of Social Media sites it adds value as an aggregator, but if you, like most users, use Flickr, Facebook and Twitter Friendfeed gives you essentially nothing more than an extra site to look at. If you only use two of those sites, as I do (I’m not a twitter user), FriendFeed becomes even less attractive.

  5. Condensed Knowledge – July 12, 2009 – Lists - Raoul Pop says:
    July 12, 2009 at 1:31 am

    [...] 7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community [...]

  6. Around The Intewebs with (jeff)isageek – July 19th | (jeff)isageek.net says:
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