Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Hi Steve.

I read your interview yesterday over at the Business Insider and thought about commenting there, but I had a lot more to say (as usual) than just a blog comment, so I thought I’d write you an open letter instead. In the interview you talked a bit about the future of Flickr, something that is very near and dear to my heart, and I wanted to reach out the best way I could and share some thoughts about Flickr with you. As someone who has been *extremely* active on the site going on seven years now I’m pretty opinionated about what the future of Flickr ought to look like.

First, thank you for the interview. It was refreshing. Over the years there has been very, very little shared about the direction of Flickr from a Yahoo management perspective. In some ways it really felt like Yahoo had just shoved Flickr in a drawer and forgotten about it. I know that’s not true, but by doing an interview like the one you did yesterday, and speaking about Flickr as a Yahoo executive publicly, that alone is a huge confidence booster. Transparency has been lacking over the years at Flickr and hearing about where it’s headed from the guy who actually holds responsibility for it was good to see.

When Butterfield was around at Flickr there was a bit more transparency. Stewart would actually get into the groups and engage with users. He’d do interviews and stuff too. But after Stewart left to go mine tin or whatever, transparency sort of just fell off a cliff. Last year Flickr wouldn’t even tell their users who was actually in charge of Flickr itself. We had to wait for the New York Times to do a piece before we learned that it was actually Matthew Rothenberg — which was silly. A leader should be out there, public, talking about the future in big, bright, bold language that inspires confidence.

In your interview you talk about Flickr nailing the future of mobile. I agree. Flickr should. I mean, everybody agrees on that right? Whether it actually happens or not is a to be determined thing, but certainly everybody on Flickr is mobile these days and we *all* want a better mobile experience.

The current Flickr mobile experience is pretty horrible. But that’s the past. I hear the Windows 7 app is decent, but then again, how many people actually have a Windows 7 phone? Not me. I haven’t even tried it. I’m sure Microsoft probably paid for you guys to build that app, but the fact that Flickr has some cool app on a Windows phone (but not Android/iPhone) in a strange way almost makes Flickr feel sort of out of step from a hip connected Instgramish image standpoint.

My only advice for mobile would be that you think hard about the the threads that are in Flickr Groups and finding a super easy way for people to read, and respond to them from a mobile app. Group threads are the hidden gem that Yahoo/Flickr might not even realize it holds. People live inside those things (and I’m not even kidding). By allowing them easier access to their threads constantly, they post more. With threads, activity begets activity and all that. So you want that well lubed in the mobile machine.

Before you get to that point though you probably really need to grasp the potential power of groups on Flickr in general. Groups on Flickr, more generally speaking, are the closest thing that Yahoo has to a sort of ($$$)Facebook($$$) type experience. Real communication and community takes place in there. More than any other place on Flickr.

Groups can be so improved so much. The lack of innovation with Flickr groups blows me away. So many ways to improve them and blow them up big. Let people better monitor activity in groups that they are not active in. Let people better follow other people’s group posts that today they are unaware are being made elsewhere. Let people filter groups so that they can hide things they are no longer interested in.

Flickr has a section for your contact’s most recent photos. They should also have a section for your contact’s most recent group conversations or posts. You’ll need to let users opt in or out of that feature as some people might feel like that was too close to stalking, but most won’t care. If my good friend Clearlight posts in some group that I’m not aware of and I never see it, that’s lost engagement potential.

Also what about my name? If someone mentions me in a group thread, isn’t that the most irresitable click of all? Yet I’m mentioned all the time (as are other users on Flickr) and we don’t even know it. Because you can’t sit on *every* group 24/7 and the group text search tool is hopelessly broken anyways.

It boggles my mind by the way that text search has been so broken in Flickr Groups for as long as it has. It’s been that way for years. That should be fixed. Text search is so 2001ish and should be super easy for a company that actually, well, indexes text on the web for search as sort of one of the main things that you do at Yahoo.

In your interview you mention that Flickr is changing.

One of the things we are looking to do this year is to really dramatically improve the user experience. If you remember, years ago Flickr’s mission was to appeal to more of the prosumer photographer — and it was really about surfacing high quality photos from a niche of photos, and we’ve changed that mission.

And the mission for Flickr today is to be the premier place for sharing photos with those people who you care about the most. So we are transitioning from the former mission to a new mission. We’re learning a lot about what people want.

This is great to hear. Along those lines, kill Explore (yikes).

Explore runs entirely counter to what your new mission plan is. Don’t kill it just to kill it. Kill it to replace it with something that is so much more in line with your new mission and will result in so much more engagement. That’s valuable real estate on Flickr that you could use to really do something that would knock the cover off the ball.

Today Explore is simply just me looking at 500 photos by strangers. They lack relevance to my life. I haven’t even been to the area in years. Even before I was blacklisted.

What you *could* do instead, is simply let Flickr’s interestingness algorithm each day rank my friends photos (or contacts photos) only. This would be so much more powerful. I don’t want to see the best photos by strangers. I want to see the best photos by my friends!

While there already is a section for my friends photos, it’s poorly organized. I simply get to see either their last 1 or 5 most recent photos with no ranking input at all. As an example, let’s say my cousin posts a photo that’s pretty good. And gets say 5 favorite marks. This photo would never make explore and there’s a good chance I’d miss it entirely if I had a fair number of friends or if they uploaded 25 photos at once or something. But by letting flickr’s interestingness algorithm sort through all my contact’s photos in a given day, 2 days, week, month, etc. you could present all of the photos of my contacts to me (not just the last 1 or 5) and create a much more relevant experience. Instead of being buried, that 5 faved photo would bubble to the top of my own personalized Explore. More relevance = better user experience = more engagement.

One last point and then I’ll shut up for a bit.

The number one area where Flickr has been broken for so many years now is in Community Management. Community Managers should *not* get in the way of community. They should be very, very, very careful about the content that they censor. They should be like well experienced surgeons even though you can’t pay them that way. Is there a problem in a group? Carefully carve out that problem, don’t just nuke the whole group. Is there a problem with a photo in someone’s stream? Make it private and hide it, don’t just blast their whole account to hell permantly erasing their stupidly unbacked up photos.

Flickr has harmed their reputation over the years badly for mismanaging community. Community management is so damn hard. They will make mistakes. They will delete the wrong account, etc. Having a back up plan and a right to appeal is critical. 99% of the time deletions are made they are probably done for the right reason. Someone was harassing/threatening someone else in a very serious way. Someone was posting blatantly stolen content only. Someone is spamming flickr with real true to life commercial spam. They get deleted and that’s the end of it. You never hear about it again and community is improved.

But when you get it wrong and hit somebody in the community who should not have been hit (like a Washington State Firefighter who is posting public info about a level 3 sex offender that moved into his neighborhood or a Pro-Democracy Egyptian blogger, etc.) you have to fix that and fast.

If you are going to err on the side of censoring or not, err on the side of not censoring. Or if you must censor, do it in a way that can be undone. It’s stupid, for example, that I’ve been banned from the Flickr help forum for two years simply for being critical of Flickr sometimes. Flickr should see criticism as an opportunity. Not as something to be squashed.

By the way, you may need to break Flickr to improve it. There has been an anti-community culture there for a long time. This is hard to explain, but improving the culture of staff for the benefit of your users won’t necessarily be easy but it will tremendously improve the site for your users.

Thank you again for your interview. I hope we see many more from you in the future. I have many more ideas and ways about how Flickr can be improved and would love to share them with you publicly or privately. I’d love to do an interview with you here on my blog as well if you’d ever consider that. Best of luck!

For the past week or so I’ve been spending some time playing around with the photosharing site 500px and am really starting to like it. The site has been around awhile (since 2003) but went through some major redesigns, most notably in the Fall of last year. The result seems to be a very elegant photosharing community that is far more focused on fine art and artistic oriented photography than Flickr is.

In a lot of ways, the site reminds me of an early Flickr, back when the staff seemed to care more and back when Flickr actually seemed to care about beautiful photography and their users.

The site has two different versions. There is a free version which features a basic photostream and limits you to 20 uploads per week and one collection. And then there is a paid version at $50 per year which offers unlimited uploads and collections.

Both versions offer unlimited hosting and a basic photostream organized by most recently uploaded photo in an elegant large square format with oversized photos when you click through. Both versions also include a free photoblog to blog your work in a different way if you’d prefer that over the traditional photostream as well as a wall where people can leave comments about you. 500px also claims that the photos are optimized for SEO so that your work can be found.

In addition to allowing unlimited uploads, the paid version allows a number of other features including the ability to link your photostream to a custom domain, an RSS feed, the ability to remove all 500px branding from your stream (aka white label), advertising free, as well as the ability to hook your stream up to a Google analytics account to better monitor traffic and activity.

In addition to your own photostream, like Flickr, you can build favorites of other photographs, comment on photographs and either “like” or “dislike” photographs which results in a public numerical score that a photograph receives. There are several areas where you can also explore some pretty amazing photography, including popular, editor’s choice, upcoming and fresh.

Perhaps what I find most refreshing about the site as it’s structured right now is that it seems to be attracting some of the most talented photographers I’ve seen on the web in any one place in long time.

Scrolling through many of the members photostreams it reminds me of some of the early photographers who gravitated to flickr using it to express the beauty of the world around them. Comparing some of the showcase areas above, for example, with Flickr’s super crappy Explore (complete with blacklisting users, sparkly gifs, and obnoxious watermarks) there simply is no comparison as to which is showing superior fine art photography. 500px is better.

Also, in contrast to Flickr’s puritanical censorship, 500px doesn’t seem to have a problem with the occasional artistic representation of the female form that, God forbid, might (gasp) actually show a naked breast. I guess it probably helps that they are Canadian and more laid back about those sorts of things. Flickr on the other hand censored this photograph of mine of an 1874 painting by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre from the Chicago Art Institute that doesn’t even show boobs.

Creating an account and profile was very easy on 500px. I liked that they don’t seem to have a problem with html markup in your profile and I was able to link all of my other social media sites. It’s also nice that your profile accompanies your photostream, favorites, etc. giving good exposure to the photographer.

Uploading photos was pretty easy. It’s also nice that 500px allows images sized up to 30MB. Flickr is stuck in the dark ages with the pre-2004 20MB limit still. When popular cameras like the Canon 5DM2 routinely produce images between 20MB and 30MB it sucks that when you use Flickr’s bulk uploader that they mangle images so badly, resizing them in some cases down to less than 500kb (example). It’s bad enough to have your images resized without being told about it, but to resize a 22MB image down to less than 5% of it’s original size just seems really cheap on Flickr’s part.

It is a drag that 500px doesn’t seem to read a photo’s metadata and allow you to auto-populate titles, keywords, descriptions/captions, etc. Hopefully they enable that soon as there is no sense in doing that work in lightroom only to have to rekey that data in after uploading to 500px. There are also lots of areas that 500px seems to have room to grow in. It would be nice to see groups there like Flickr has.

Like Flickr, 500px allows you an embed code to blog your images, as well as the buttons necessary to share your image to other popular social networking sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc.

I think more than any of the above items, what’s got me most interested in 500px though, is what feels to me like a truly refreshing view of photography from the people who work there. Flickr staffers have routinely expressed their disdain over the years for the fine art photographer. They’ve deleted accounts without warning, they’ve censored artists, they’ve blacklisted many from Explore, they’ve banned artists from the public help forum areas, and in general just routinely treat us (their users) like garbage. We’ve been talked down to, treated like children, and been openly abused.

Compare and contrast Flickr’s disdain for the artistic fine art photographer with this “about” page from 500px.

“The mission
Being an artist has never been easy, especially in today’s fast paced, digital age. Photographers can’t be just artists anymore, they have to be managers, accountants, marketing teams, assistants, web developers, and their own ‘mean, lean, shutter-clicking machines”. Too many things to handle? We sure think so! We started the company to help photographers get greater exposure, reduce some of the marketing headaches, and to let creatives concentrate on what they do best. We love seeing amazing work and equally love promoting it! A sense of inspired community is also important to us. We believe that the way forward is through presenting, discussing, supporting, and socializing with like-minded people.”

Our Team
500px is a group of individuals that live and breathe photography. We like to share art with others and have the means to do so. Our small company is based in Toronto and from there we broadcast the awesomeness. We truly enjoy what we do.

That reads so refreshing.

500px still has a lot of work to do to continue competing with Flickr, but thus far I’ve found it to be very community centered and certainly with great potential. They state that they are currently seeking angel and VC funding here.

You can check out my photostream and follow me on 500px here.

Thanks by the way to my good rooftopping Pal Tomms, for turning me on to this awesome site. Check out this amazing photograph that he posted on 500px!

Update: Ian Sobolev, one of the founders of 500px, commented in the comment section below and added a link where readers can get a 20% discount on the paid Awesome Upgrade for the site. If you want to upgrade to the paid version you can save 20% by upgrading through this link, with no expiration date. Thanks, Ian!