Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Yesterday Flickr rolled out the latest feature to their service, what they are calling “People in Photos.” Essentially the site now allows you to tag other Flickr members in photos and then those photos appear on their profile page. The other person is also notified (the first time only) when they are tagged by flickrmail. You can tag people in your own photos or in other photos unless they are blocking you on Flickr. If you do not like a photo that you are in where you are tagged you can remove your people tag and/or block the person who has tagged you to prevent them from tagging you in the future.

Along with the new feature they also redesigned the Flickr profile page to both include photos that you are in and your most recent favorites. As it stands right now both of these two new sections show the most recent photos you’ve either faved or been tagged in. Since some might prefer some different photographs of themself over other photographs their profile page, it would seem that some sort of organizer would make sense for your profile pics in the future, but at present it simply shows the 12 photos you’ve most recently been tagged in on your main profile page with a link to more photos off the main profile page.

I’ve played around with the new people tags for the past 16 hours or so and have to say overall I like it. The service seems fast, easy and intuitive. Simply draw a box over someone’s face on a flickr photo and start typing in their name and it highlights from your contacts who logically the person might be. If they are not a contact of yours you can use a “search through all Flickr members” option to try and find them elsewhere on the site. It would also be nice if flickr had some sort of bulk tagging tool (do I really have to people tag all 84 photos I’ve got of Kevin Rose one by one?).

Because some people choose unusual names for themselves on Flickr instead of their formal names, sometimes you also have to do a little googling to find just the name that you want. I did find that I was unable to tag a few people because they’d blocked me (no I’m not naming names) and others because I simply couldn’t find them on Flickr (are you on Flickr Daniel Burka or Bret Taylor?). It might be nice if Flickr also allowed you to type a user’s email address into this search box to try and cross reference them on flickr by email.

If you want to add yourself to a photo you can do that too. (tip: type me in the search box for a shortcut rather than your name).

Although I thought the profile photos and favorites were displayed pretty well, I hate the page that you go to for “more” photos of you (here’s mine). It’s not near as elegant. Flickr should use a format more like the square sets thumbnail images rather than the clunky small view thumbnails. While I like the thumbnails of photos that you are in and favorites on the profile page, I thought the way that they moved testimonials to the middle column also feels clunky. I liked it better back over in the right column where they had it before. The spacing on the testimonials also feels awkward from a design perspective.

As part of the redesign they’ve also axed the sections on the profile page which used to include your interests, favorite music and favorite books. No big loss there. I lost a quote that I had put there in the books section about Jack Kerouac, but I just moved that quote up to my main profile section. If you lost data in that change do a Google search for your profile and use the cached view to copy any data there that was important to you.

They also added the phrase “…in my own words,” at the top of the profile page section. That sounds a little hokey to me.

I also don’t like how Flickr has positioned groups now on your profile page. The listing of groups defaults to displaying the oldest groups you are in first. Unfortunately many of these groups are dead groups or inactive groups. Flickr instead should sort the groups by activity. This would give other users a better place to discover actual active groups that their friends and contacts might be in.

I do like that Flickr has now added when you joined Flickr. It makes me feel more like an American Express Cardmember now. “Thomas Hawk…. on Flickr since August 2004.” I think these sorts of changes give people who are checking you out a little more insight into your history and activity on the service and interaction with other users.

People who won’t like this new feature will likely be the privacy types who don’t want people to so easily view photos that they are in. Because you can opt out of this feature though I’m not sure that it’s that big of an imposition for those folks. Especially since you are notified the first time that you are people tagged, if you don’t like it you can easily just go to the settings section and disable it.

From a bigger picture sort of perspective this is a logical new feature to add. While Flickr doesn’t have the largest collection of photos on the web (I believe that distinction now belongs to facebook), they have the largest collection of *organized* and high quality photos anywhere on the web. By getting their users to people tag, this gives them greater data to use in other ways. Certainly data that strongly suggests that a user is actually in a photo would be useful to rank by interestingness more broadly in search engines when people search for someone’s specific name.

Right now if you do a Google search for “Thomas Hawk” it shows you a row of thumbnails that Google thinks are most relevant on the main search page. Right now these thumbnails are not so relevant. While the thumbnails are of photos I’ve taken, they are not photos of me. I think when you are searching for a person’s name, probably photos of them ought to rank among the most relevant of images. By getting this important social data, Flickr/Yahoo can work to ensure that photos of actual people begin showing up more prominently in search queries for them. I’m not sure how much this matters for Yahoo now as they’ve turned their search over to Bing, but I think it could be helpful data for Bing to mine to improve their own search queries.

Of course also from a different bigger picture sort of perspective this new features worries me as well. Because Flickr has not addressed their common practice of nuking users accounts and data without warning, I suppose this might be one more example of hours that someone could pour into Flickr only to have it all wiped out with the push of a button by an overly vindictive Flickr “community management” censor type.

Yesterday the Yahoo! executive who reportedly oversaw Flickr , Scott Dietzen, resigned from Yahoo! according to TechCrunch. It was also reported yesterday that Yahoo has now retained Goodby, Silverstein and Partners to somehow try and recover from their failing marketing campaign.

While Yahoo censors paintings of classical nudes from public museums, their employees are off getting public lap dances at Yahoo “Hack Day.”

How can Yahoo seriously expect us to accept their $100 million marketing big lie that "the internet is under new management, yours," when they carelessly and maliciously destroy customer data without so much as a warning?

Yahoo’s new $100 million marketing campaign should not read "the internet is under new management yours." It should read "the internet is under new management ours."

Until Yahoo learns to respect their users and their user data and embraces true community management rather than community mis-management, their outlandish marketing message will continue to fall on deaf ears.

Here is an open letter I wrote to the head of Yahoo’s Marketing efforts, Elisa Steele, regarding these problems.

A few months back I wrote a blog post detailing my experience selling stock photography through both Getty Images’ Flickr Collection program as well as a new program allowing you to sell your photography through ClusterShot. The title of my post “Is 20% of something better than 88% of nothing” compared my own experience with the companies and my sales through the companies as of last May. Getty pays out about 20% for royalty free images while ClusterShot pays out 88%.

Today I just received my sixth monthly statement from Getty Images and I thought it an appropriate time to revist my experience selling stock photography through both companies.

At present I’ve got 68 images offered for sale through Getty. You can see my Getty images for sale here. For my first six months in the program I’ve earned $883.35 from the sale of 22 images.

At present I’ve got 30,848 images offered for sale through ClusterShot. You can see my Clustershot images for sale here. So far I’ve earned $338.80 from the sale of 3 images.

I have to say that I’m pleased that I’ve sold any photos at all through ClusterShot. I was not sure how that was going to go as ClusterShot is a new start up vs. Getty Images as the industry leader in stock photography. There is a lot that I like about ClusterShot. Their 88% payout to photographers is *very* generous vs. Getty’s 20% payout. I like that I’m not locked into or committed to any exclusivity agreement with images from ClusterShot. I like that I can market *all* of my photos through ClusterShot and not just the ones selected by Getty editors. I also like that ClusterShot flows seamlessly through Flickr and I can just point my ClusterShot account to my Flickrstream and through the API have my images automatically pulled into ClusterShot without having to do any work on my part. ClusterShot also seems to be indexing well with Google and I’ve received both sales and queries regarding my photos through Google searches.

On the other hand I think Getty is by far the more professionally oriented stock photography agency. Getty ensures that images are cleared correctly. They require model and location releases where needed. They have the marketing clout behind the largest stock photography agency in the world.

As a photographer ClusterShot is much more appealing to me than Getty in a lot of ways. Certainly I hope that they gain significant market share going forward and that more and more image buyers considering using them. They seem very committed to providing the lion share of image profits to the actual creator of the image, you the photographer. I do also hope that new ventures like ClusterShot end up putting pressure on agencies like Getty to bring the payouts up a bit higher than where they are today.

The vast majority of my image licensing profits still come directly. People find my images on Google Image Search, or Flickr, or Zooomr, or FriendFeed or other sites and simply contact me directly about licensing them. Best of all those sales still pay out 100% to me the photographer.

Does anyone else out there have experience selling images with Getty/Flickr or ClusterShot? If so what are your experiences. If you are an image buyer what do you think of these two programs?

Please take a second and read this important thread in the Flickr Ideas Forum regarding greater protection for Flickr members and large groups against Flickr account/group deletion. Reform against unwarned account/group deletions are necessary and protect us all.

Thanks.

While Yahoo! professes to care about "you" in their new multi million dollar marketing campaign, in actuality Yahoo!’s Flickr destroys user data.

Your sites, your mail, your friends, your whatever, yes totally.

…unless your site is on Yahoo’s flickr and then they can nuke it whenever they feel like it.

More information here.

Brad Evans, Stuart Dixon, Troy Holden (the artist formerly known as Plug1) and Julie Michelle, have launched a *fantastic* new San Francisco photoblog and collective called Caliber.

The blog will focus mostly on imagery around the San Francisco Bay area with occasional posts based on their travels from time to time. These are four outstanding photographers committed to documenting the Bay Area around them. It’s fantastic and strong publication for those who live in the Bay Area and for those who would like to look in through their eyes from afar.

Congrats to Caliber on their new launch!

Olympic Volleyball Image by cmaccubbin used via a Creative Commons license.

In a move that is a bit disappointing to me (but understandable), photographer Richard Giles has changed the licensing on all of his photos of the Olympic Games on Flickr from Creative Commons to All Rights Reserved. This was not done because this is how Giles preferred it, it was done because the International Olympic Committee (IOC), after considering Giles’ request that he be allowed to use a Creative Commons non-commercial license on his images, decided that they would not back down and came back insisting on the license for the images.

As I’ve said previously, this accomplishes nothing for the IOC. The Creative Commons license is irrevocable as I understand it and per Creative Commons, and as such I think that this change offers the IOC no additional protection regarding use of the images. There are still thousands of Creative Commons licensed images (and many more to be uploaded in the future) on Flickr and in other places like wikipedia on the web.

I doubt that the IOC will be sending cease and desist letters to all of these individuals. While they may have effectively removed Giles’ images from Creative Commons searches on Flickr, there still is an extremely large and growing body of work of the Olympic Games available for other publishers to choose from (see the photo above). It will be interesting to see if the IOC decides to play whack-a-mole for the next few years or if they will eventually realize that the games are effectively too large to really be contained the way that they’d like to contain them.

I think this move on their part reflects negatively on the Olympics and the games and has generated negative publicity for the IOC.

Giles has a rundown of the thinking behind his decision to relicense his photos “all rights reserved” here.

I was also disappointed by the tone of the follow up phone call that Giles said he received from the IOC. Especially where Giles says, “In the phone call he suggested that I’d gone off, “half cocked,” and should not have shared the IOC’s letter on Flickr. ”

Personally I think cease and desist letters *ought* to be shared at places like Flickr. They ought to be as public as possible. If an organization wants to challenge freedom on the internet then they needed to be prepared to deal with the PR side of the fallout from that. The IOC very much deserved to receive the lumps that it did over that letter especially. The letter actually stated that images of the Olympic Games “belong” to the IOC. That’s just ridiculous and I’m sure completely unenforceable. Even the license on the back of an Olympic ticket does not require photographers to assign the ownership of their work to the IOC. While it might try and dictate how the images can be used, claiming outright ownership over the images was way over the top on the IOC’s part in my opinion.

Anyways, I hope the IOC reconsiders how they deal with Creative Commons licensed photography in the future and I hope that lawyers at some forward thinking organization like the EFF or Creative Commons might find their way to Giles to convince him to fight this with their help.

Dear Elisa:

Last month when you announced Yahoo! Inc’s new multi-million dollar ad campaign including the tagline, “the internet’s under new management yours,” I wrote you an open letter. While admittedly the letter was critical and even a bit sarcastic at times regarding censorship on Yahoo’s photo sharing site Flickr, I nonetheless was hopeful that perhaps Yahoo was sincere in your latest marketing message. I thought the statement was much better than the last big Yahoo marketing campaign about everybody needing to wear purple clothes or whatever, and as someone who values customer service oriented companies, I thought it was a positive statement for Yahoo to make.

Unfortunately, at this point, however, I am going to have to call bullshit on your new campaign. I assume it’s ok with you that I’m using such strong language to describe your campaign. Your boss Carol Bartz has built a big reputation as a tough talker with salty language so I’m hoping you’ll understand.

You see Elisa, despite the fact that seemingly everywhere I turn in San Francisco I see another one of your new ads on a bus shelter somewhere, the message rings hollow. It’s doublespeak. It’s inauthentic.

Yesterday, your Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ destroyed a community on Flickr that was home to over 3,000 hard-core Yahoo users. It was a community of photographers, many of whom have spent years on Yahoo in a group that was rich and vibrant. The group had over 5,000 ongoing conversations in it. It’s where many of us lived on Yahoo. The group was in part dedicated to free speech, but it was so much more than that. The group was a place where we talked about music. Where we shared tips on photography. Where we debated about film vs. digital. Where we went to ask each other for advice on what lens we ought to purchase next. It was a place where many of us went to meet each day. It was a place where offline photography meetups were organized. We actually published a magazine together. Many of us became good friends in real life.

But yesterday, while we were conversing there, and without any warning or opportunity to take any sort of self-corrective action, your Community Manager went nuclear and destroyed all of that user data. All of it. Every last thread. With a push of a button. Threads that were meaningful and important to us.

This was data that did not belong to Yahoo! Elisa. You destroyed something that did not belong to you. You destroyed hours and hours of peoples hard work maliciously and callously. You destroyed a group dedicated to free speech, but more significantly you destroyed a group that thousands of people had put significant emotional energy into.

And do you know what your Community Manager was tweeting mere seconds before she nuked this very popular group Elisa? She was tweeting “I hate your freedom.”

That’s right Elisa I, hate, your, freedom. That’s the image that I chose to go with this letter to you. A screenshot of her freedom hating tweet.

While I’m sure your representative got a good laugh out of that tweet, personally I found it as offensive as the fact that so much user data was destroyed so callously in the first place. You see Elisa, Yahoo already has a problem with people thinking that you hate freedom. Remember when Jerry Yang got called before the U.S. Congress and was brow beaten after you all released private emails to the Chinese Govt which resulted in a Chinese journalist’s imprisonment to this day? Remember just last week when rumors (very unfounded rumors I might add) were flying that Yahoo! had released private information on thousands of freedom seeking dissidents to the Iranian Govt?

“I hate your freedom?” Really Elisa? This is the marketing message that you as Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer want to send out to the world as you rip apart an online community dedicated to free speech. It’s distasteful and it’s offensive.

You see Elisa, all the money spent in the world on bus stop billboards cannot make your marketing message ring true when the real voices, real human authentic voices online, ring out that the internet (at least at Yahoo!) is in fact very much not under our management at all. In fact our feelings are not taken into consideration one iota. We, thousands of us, are tossed aside, thrown out like garbage. Our hard work destroyed by you. Not only do actions like this invalidate your message, they create enormous ill will against Yahoo that will stand for many years going forward.

A number of help forum threads (now all conveniently locked down by your staff) were created over the destruction of this group. I will quote you the official Yahoo! statement, again from Ms. Champ stated in one of those locked threads:

“Flickr is a community with fences. If you want the open range, then unfortunately, what you want to do is beyond what we allow.”

You see how that reads Elisa? It does not read that Yahoo is all about “you” at all. It’s a patronizing statement that says Yahoo is not about what “you” want. It’s about what “we” want. I hope you can see how this statement directly contradicts your current marketing slogan that the internet is under new management, you.

I’m sure you are familiar with John Gilmore, Elisa, a well respected thinker who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a quite respected organization that fights for freedom online. John Gilmore once said, “the Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it.” And that’s what many of us have now done. Many of us in the community that was destroyed have now decided that we will no longer use Yahoo for our community experience. Yahoo simply cannot be trusted to not destroy thousands of hours of our work in the future. Instead we will be using community space hosted by one of your competitors, FriendFeed, a site owned by Facebook.

You see, despite not having a large glitzy “the internet’s about you,” campaign, to my knowledge FriendFeed has never censored anyone. They have this really cool feature allowing users to block somebody if you don’t like what they have to say instead. It’s great. When you do that they just disappear entirely on the site for you. Poof. Magic. Rather than pay for salaries and benefits for a team of censors, they just let their users block content that they don’t like and let me tell you, it works *alot* better that way.

Interestingly enough Elisa, FriendFeed was founded in part by the very guy who came up with the Google (another one of your competitors) slogan, “don’t be evil,” — as a marketing exec I’m sure you realize how powerful of a corporate message that has turned out to be, much more powerful than everybody needs to wear purple.

I’d hope that you could see how nuking an entire group over what was a skirmish between maybe two members in the group might not make sense. You used a shotgun to kill a gnat.

Many things could have been done to more responsibly address the Yahoo concern in question. Admins of the group could have been warned and given an opportunity to take corrective action on their own, the single offending post could have been deleted rather than destroying thousands of posts 99.9% of which were entirely unoffensive, you could have simply removed what you found offensive and locked the group down, leaving a rich collection of user data to at least exist in an archive format for future reference for those who had created it.

It did not need to be nuked.

I do hope you take a moment out of your busy day to address this situation personally Elisa because it is damaging to both Yahoo’s brand and your own campaign that you are spending significant shareholder money on.

And as long as these are the types of actions that you and your management stand behind then your current campaign is very much meaningless indeed. I do also hope that you do not allow your staff to personally retaliate against me by nuking my own flickr photostream for writing to you what is in fact a very respectful letter.

Thomas Hawk

Flickr just nuked deleteme uncensored. A group with a long tradition on Flickr with over 5,000 posts and 3,000 members all gone, instantly. Flickr objected to discussions in the group which they said violated Flickr’s TOS.

This was done without warning.

Rather than delete a single offending thread or offer any type of alternative arrangement flickr simply nuked the group.

It is clear to me now that an uncensored internet discussion forum is not possible on Flickr. In light of Flickr’s decision to nuke DMU I’ve set up (for now) a temporary arrangement where the game can still be played here.

This new group will have no forum associated with it. Instead the forum has been moved to FriendFeed, a site much more open to free speech. I would encourage any of the DMU members to join the new group on FriendFeed here where we can discuss what went down more specifically.

FriendFeed’s forum structure is a bit different (but very similar) to Flickr’s.