Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Flickr announced two new features today, an Android app and something called “Flickr Photo Session” where users can share photos and chat with each other. I’ve not had time yet to extensively play with either of these two new products, but here are my off the cuff initial reactions.

1. Flickr Photo Session. With Flickr Photo Session, basically you can invite up to 10 friends to look at a set or some sort of shared content together on flickr. You can use text chat to chat with each other and even make doodles on the photos as you chat about them.

WTF? Who would ever use this? Are you kidding me? So you mean I can take a slide set of my vacation photos and invite 10 cool friends to *text* chat about them with me? And we can draw a mustache on the statue that I took a photo of and lol wtf roflmao about them? What is this, AOL? Who would ever even accept an invitation to such a horrid experience? Photo Sessions are going to be terribly lonely places. Text chat was so last decade.

Why not just join a google hangout instead where we can all see each other face to face on video/audio (and text chat too if we want) and share our screens and go through a slide show that way instead? Also with a Google hangout I’m not limited to just flickr. I can share any photos anywhere on the web. Also I’m not bored to tears just looking at 1,000 photos of someone’s new puppies or grand canyon photos.

It seems like Flickr tried to model this a little after photophlow. The difference though is that with photophlow people with spare time joined an empty group and could chat about any photo on flickr. By restricting Flickr Photo Session to invitees, nobody is ever going to accept the invitations — who wants to be bored to death? — and the doodling on photos thing may be the dumbest feature I’ve ever seen launched on flickr.

They do allow you to use a url to invite people (so maybe you could tweet that out or something) but really I can’t imagine anyone that actually wants to do this — except possibly and just maybe around some of the mammoth archive of underground porn that’s on flickr.

2. The Android App. The number one thing that flickr should have focused on with building an app is giving people an opportunity to easily interact with each other in group threads.

Groups are where the social on flickr happens. People are addicted to groups. I quit all the groups I was active in after too many bad experiences (trolls, personal harassment, anonymous venomous haters, etc.) but many people *are* still involved in flickr groups. It’s crazy to me that they didn’t put together a basic reader to easily read group threads in the app. Like their other app before (you know that crappy one that Yahoo Mobile made) groups are ignored in the new one as well.

On the other hand, they did do search *very* well in the new app. Specifically I can search for one of my photos and then find it and easily go to the set of photos it’s in. This is great.

Once I’m in the set I can swipe the screen to move across from photo to photo in a nice large oversized lightbox with an elegant title. This is slick. This is a great way for me to show photos to people in real life, at a party, over at my house, at the baseball game, etc. (where they are captive and have to put up with it, rather than respond to a text chat sharing invitation).

The new app has a section for recent activity. This is the most addictive page of all on flickr. Unfortunately they don’t tell you the number of faves your photos have received. This is important. They should add this in.

The new app lets you see your contact’s photos (and you can fave and comment on them). I can’t seem to figure out a way to toggle between contacts and friends though. In my case (I’m an edge case) I’ve got over 20,000 contacts. I’m much more interested in the 400+ people on flickr that I call friends.

Final thoughts. I think Flickr Photo Sessions is the dumbest thing to come to Flickr ever — even dumber than flickr galleries (limiting people to 15 photos that are completely ignored that nobody uses) or limiting videos on flickr to 90 seconds (which also hasn’t taken off ). I’m pretty sure Photo Sessions is going to bomb big time.

The Android app missed the boat by not including groups. It’s better than the miserable previous app that the Yahoo Mobile team built though.

More then either of these two points though, both of these “innovations” come too little too late. On a personal level I’m spending 95% of my photo sharing time on Google+ now and the photo sharing community is rapidly leaving flickr and setting up base there.

I’m pretty much done with flickr other than a repository to just dump photos to, so I doubt I’ll use these new features much at all.

Also Interesting, as part of today’s announcement Flickr Chief Steve Douty also outlined Flickr’s new corporate strategy “Deeply Personal Digital Experiences” going forward which is built around a periodic table of elements. It has all kinds of buzzworthy type things in there like – En: To engage and delight users. – Be: To be where the customer goes. – Si: To deliver personal meaning through science and data. – So: To own real social relationships on the web. – Ec: To build an ecosystem.

Unfortunately as admirable as these buzzwords are coming from Douty, they ring hollow to me and sound just like more goobly gook empty Yahoo corporate speak that they’ve been shoveling at us for the past few years (remember that “the internet is under new management — yours” $100 million marketing campaign?) I responded to Douty’s new campaign here. If Douty really cared about these ideas, he’d address the deeper problems inside of Flickr.

Update: I take it back what I said about there possibly being an application for Photo Session with Flickr’s underground porn archive. Apparently you cannot do a photo session with content unless it is coded as “safe” by flickr. So porn sharing is likely off limits with this new feature.

If you’re on Google+ there’s a good chance that over the past few days you’ve noticed a huge bump up in your number of followers. For some it’s just double or triple would you’d normally get on a given day. For others it’s like someone tied a rocket ship to their G+ account and sent it soaring into the atmosphere.

Alot of people are wondering what’s going on. Why has everyone’s follower account just skyrocketed — BLOWN UP. The answer is simple. Shared Circles.

Two days ago Google launched their latest feature for Google+, the ability to share your circles with others on the site and even publicly. When someone shares a circle you can add the entire circle at once to the contacts that you follow on the site, or you can pick and choose from different people in the circle.

All kinds of circles are being shared. Louis Gray shared this circle of people who work for Google. Paul Allen has this shared circle of VCs. Jeff Jarvis shared his circle of journalists on G+. Michelle Marie has this Cool Chicks on G+ circle. Robert Scoble has this circle of tech execs and entrepreneurs.

And then of course there are the photographers. Here’s Leo Laporte’s Photography Circle he talked about today on TWIT Photos. There are way too many photography shared circles bouncing around Google+ right now to even try and keep up.

Circles are limited to 250 people so I had to break my Kick Ass Photographers on G+ into two circles. You can find A-K here and L-Z here (by first name) — and totally sorry to people I may have left off my photographers circle list. I’m super unorganized and *know* that I’ve left off some amazing photographers. I’m already kicking myself hard in the shins for forgetting about some of my very best photography friends on this list.

I think my favorite circle shared so far is this one by Micah Wittman. Something about the Breakfast Club coming out when I was in 10th grade gives it a special place in my heart.

Anyways, circle sharing is exploding on G+ right now — and what is this doing? This is BLOWING up everyone’s follower account. People are discovering hundreds of new and interesting contacts and they can add them all in one fell swoop.

This is so, so, so, smart on Google’s part — for a number of reasons.

First, it just generates a ton of buzz for the site. People are happy and excited to see their follower counts grow. Many people are commenting that for the first time their follower counts on G+ are more than flickr or Twitter or Facebook or wherever else they hang out. If they weren’t invested in Google+ two days ago, they sure are now. The past two days have also been pure *fun* on Google+. Everybody’s in the best mood and loving seeing this happen.

Second, the way that followers are being added is ensuring that the *right* followers are being added. There is nothing like the recommendation of a friend when it comes to a high quality follower. Lots of sites have friend of a friend feature, but I’ve yet to see any site turn it on with turbo like Google+ has done here.

Who better to turn to for recommendations on entrepreneurs and tech execs than Robert Scoble? Who better to turn to find journalists than Jeff Jarvis? You know these people and trust their recommendations and by giving you access to their circles it *blows* up whomever they list. But even if you are not on these high profile lists, *everybody* is sharing circles — so the long tail kicks in — even someone with only 20 followers may end up on sister Sue’s my family members that I love the most shared circle.

Third, it builds community. People are thrilled when they are added to a circle. I’ve gotten so many thank yous today, bonds are strengthened — more of that feel good super positive pixie dust that gets sprinkled all over Google+.

Finally, I think this once and for all puts those lame “Google+ is a ghost town” articles by clueless disconnected journalists to rest. The activity over the past few days on G+ has been nothing short of explosive. If you’re missing it at this point, you really do have your head buried in the sand. It’s also a strong signal to anyone who is not on Google+ yet that this product is a winner and a big part of the future of your online life on the internet — you can keep waiting if you want to, but if you do you’re missing out on the best party on the web right now.

The end result is that we all get more interesting accounts to follow (in one fell swoop). People are excited. This feature was a home run by Google. People are far more invested in the network than they were 2 days ago and pretty much everybody in their own way is blowing up their numbers on the site.

Google+ continues to roll out innovation after innovation. Shared circles is a hit. Want to know why your follower count blew up the past 2 days, thank Google+’s shared circles.

By the way, I’m approaching 150,000 followers now on G+ myself after only a little over 3 months. G+ is the best place for social interaction on the web today (especially for photographers). That’s almost 8x the number of followers I have on Flickr after 7 years. Woah!

If you’re a photographer and want an audience for your work, you simply have to be on Google+.

I just love this video of Lotus Carroll and I above. It’s four seconds stretched out into one minute and was from one of the backstage stations managed by Dell at this year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival. Watch here also as my pal Robert Scoble takes a water balloon to the face and the band Delta Spirit does a band video here. These were made with a Phantom Camera that shoots 1,200-2,500 frames per second which can stretch 2 seconds of real time video into as much as 2.5 to 3 minutes of footage.

Dell sponsored this station to record interesting content to be broadcasted by C3 at this year’s festival. C3 is the company that produces the Austin City Limits Music Festival as well as Lollapalooza. Dell was very involved behind the scenes at this year’s festival and all of the the live streaming of the festival (and Lollapalooza) was done with Dell hardware for the first time this year.

Dell had invited Scoble and I along with other members of the media/blogosphere to take a look at their behind the scenes work. [Disclosure: Dell covered my travel/festival expenses associated with this visit].

As part of our behind the scenes tour we were taken to the live mobile studio where the live streaming of the festival was being done. Here, a team of creative professionals, managed by Arts + Labor Creative Director Erik Horn, in real time pushed out live feeds of the performances to ACL’s YouTube channel. They also produced clips and video content to be shown onstage live at ACL between acts.

Photos clockwise starting top: one of Arts + Labor video editors edits video live during ACL, one of the workstations used to produce event video, video editors working on editing live ACL video streams, one of the Dell workstations used to produce the live video., one of the switchers used to switch stages for live video.

Last year the production team used Macs and Final Cut Pro to do their video work, but that didn’t work as well as it could have and so they went searching for better alternatives. With live streaming and live video editing, things have to be done very, very fast. Last year’s set up was also very hard drive intensive with laptops and drives daisy chained in the production studio.

Horn described last year’s Mac set up as “laptop firewired dangerous daisy chain nonsense.” Horn did an audio interview on their production set up this year that Scoble recorded here.

This year Dell and the Festival worked together to collaboratively come up with a Dell centralized file system setup using Adobe Premiere that would work for Arts + Labor.

Arts + Labor Creative Director Erik Horn

In addition to simplifying the production hardware (no more daisy chained hard drives), according to Dell they were able to work with Arts + Labor to put together a studio that was 40% faster at producing video as well. Dell also said that customizing this set up for Arts + Labor was part of a renewed focus by Dell to really begin targeting high end professional workstation use and helping customers come up with more custom solutions that could be tailored specifically to their needs rather than simply leaving them to out of the box type hardware setups that might not be as customized for them.

With the new setup, Arts + Labor used two Dell Precision 4600 workstations to stream live stage video feeds into. These work stations relied on onstage video cameras which sent fiber optic feeds into these workstations. These feeds then each went to a Dell Precision 7500 workstation which acted as a central server. Dell Precision 5500 workstations were then used to do the actual video editing and production.

I thought it was interesting to see a very powerful creative team make a switch from Macs to Dells. Having highly visible teams like Arts + Labor switch makes me wonder if Apple isn’t so focused on iPhones and iPads that they aren’t asleep at the switch with regards to higher end production like what Arts + Labor did at ACL this year.

In addition to putting this together for C3 Dell is now out marketing their desire to do more of these sorts of custom set ups for higher-end businesses in the media and other businesses.

While I was at ACL I was able to take photos of a number of great bands there in addition to these behind the scenes photos. You can see a set I’ve started of my photos from ACL here.

Coldplay Performing Live at this year’s Austin City Limits Festival

The Phantom camera used to make slow motion video clips (and the video of Lotus and I above) backstage at ACL.

Thanks again to Dell for having us out to show us the work that they were doing and thanks especially to Richard Binhammer who is Dell’s main social media tour de force for showing us such great hospitality while we were out there. I’ve known Richard for years online, but it was great to finally meet him and hang out in person in real life. If anyone ever embodies Dell’s slogan “The Power to Do More,” it’s Richard.

Update: Check out Lotus Carroll’s post on the Austin City Limits Music Festival this year here.

Great news today from Google. They’ve opened up Google+ to everyone. It’s no longer invite only. Along with opening it up to the entire world they finished up eight other new features as well — including SEARCH! Danny Sullivan has a great wrap up on the new search feature here.

They also added the ability to broadcast and record hangouts which is super cool as well. I’ve done a number of hangouts and they are a fun way to hang out at the end of the day online with a group of 9 of your friends. Because hangouts only accomodate 10, alot of people were left out and not able to watch them. Now that you can broadcast and record them people who can’t get in can at least still watch.

100 features since launching less than three months ago. AMAZING! Why can’t other sites do this?

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a team innovate so quickly around a product. It’s refreshing and exciting to see something so innovating going on and it’s been so fun for me being a part of it all as well. I love being able to say that I signed up for Google+ on the first day that it was open as invite only to the public.

I’m especially proud of the vibrant photography community that has emerged out of Google+. So many amazing photographers coming together to share their work visually. I’ve also been so pleased seeing Google embrace and help nurture this new community on their site. Dell and Google+ cosponsored our photowalk this past weekend in Austin and both came through with great prizes for a photo contest. Congratulations btw to our grand prize winner Emma Hollingsworth who took the winning photo with an iPhone! More on that here.

Klout also announced today that they are integrating G+ into their product as well. I hooked mine up a few minutes ago.

I took the above photo of Dave Cohen, Lotus Carroll and Vincent Mo at the Austin City Limits Music Festival this past weekend. It was great to see Google+ out at the festival with a big presence (they even sponsored a stage!). The message was accidental, but I love it.

Are you a photographer not on Google+? What are you waiting for? Sign up today. You can add me to your circle here.

I’m super excited to be heading out to Austin on Thursday to shoot Austin City Limits’ Music Festival going on this coming weekend.

In addition to ACL we are going to do a fun photowalk on Saturday. There are already 91 people signed up for Saturday morning’s walk! Wow! If you live in the Austin area or will be in town for ACL definitely come on out and join us for a morning walk. We’re going to shoot some of the great Austin bridges over the Colorado River and some of the great scenes along Zilker Park.

Check out this photo of the Stevie Ray Vaughn sculpture in Zilker Park taken by Peter Tsai. Peter did a coffee table photo book on Austin and is one of the photographers helping us lead this walk.

This photowalk will be an official Dell / Google+ Photowalk and joining me in leading it will be my pal Robert Scoble; Richard Binhammer (aka RichardatDell) from Dell; Chris Chabot, Natalie Villalobos, Vincent Mo, and Dave Cohen (all from Google); local Austin photographers Lotus Carroll and Jack Hollingsworth; Alvin Toro is also flying in from L.A. to help run the walk.

What a great group of photographers! If you are on Google+ already I’d recommend circling all of the folks linked above. If you’re not on Google+ yet you are missing one of the best parties on the web right now — what are you waiting for? GET ON THERE! — oh and you can find me on Google+ here

By way of disclosure, Dell (the power to do more!!!) is flying both myself and Robert Scoble out to the Festival for the weekend — they’re paying for our airfare, hotel and have arranged the weekend media passes for us to shoot ACL. Thank much to Dell and their generosity.

Part of the reason why Dell wants us out there is that they are showing us a lot of the cutting edge tech that they are using to run a lot of the behind the scenes at ACL. I’ll get lots of photos of this cool tech stuff too. Dell is responsible for live streaming the two biggest stages at the festival this year on YouTube using their Dell workstations and AMD FirePro Graphics.

Dell also did all the streaming for Lollapalooza earlier this year as well as U2′s most recent tour.

Previously the video production for ACL used Macs and Final Cut Pro but this solution didn’t work so well for actually streaming it live to the web. ACL’s new setup is using this Dell workstation, editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, and then streaming it back out live to YouTube with another of the same model workstations. It will be interesting to watch them do this in real time.

Dell also will have a “video village” where roaming videographers out in the field doing interviews with bands and musicians and capturing other video will return with their memory cards to have the edited video clips quickly converted into more YouTube content.

I’m also going to be working with the Google+ and Google Photos team over at the Google+ stage at the festival. They are going to be signing up people for Google+ right there at the Festival and taking portraits of people who sign up for a live photo feed / slide show there at the Festival.

I’ll post more about what I’m doing in Austin once I fly into town, but I’m super excited to be hanging out with the cool folks from Dell and Google and getting to spend a weekend shooting some AWESOME musical acts at Austin City Limits’ Festival.

Note! This is a very unscientific poll.

Let me repeat myself, this is a VERY UNSCIENTIFIC POLL. I understand statistics. I understand how flawed this poll is. Please do not rattle off in the comments about all the problems with this poll being unscientific.

I ALREADY KNOW!

Now that we’ve got *that* out of the way…

Earlier this morning I posted a poll at GoPollGo (it’s a cool polling site that my friend Robert Scoble turned me on to yesterday) asking people the following simple question.

“Where is the best place to share your photos on the web?”

I gave people five choices and put them in alphabetical order 500px, Facebook, Flickr, Google+ and Twitter. I really was only interested in social sharing sites so I didn’t include pay sites like SmugMug or Zenfolio, or sites that are primarily for photo hosting like Photobucket or mobile based apps like Instagram.

Next, I posted a link to the poll to each of my accounts on the five sites mentioned so that I could push the poll, at least to a degree into every site that was included. I have a large following on each of these sites.

2,514 individuals had voted in the poll as of 3:49 pm this afternoon (the poll is still open).

The answer by a wide margin?

You might be surprised, but I’m not.

Google+.

Google+ took a whopping 68% of the votes in this morning’s poll. Flickr came in 2nd with 16%. Facebook was 3rd with 11%. 500px was 4th with 4%. And Twitter came in dead last with 1%.

And by Google+ I also mean its back end storage site Picasa (which should totally be rebranded as Google Photos).

A few weeks ago I blogged that Flickr was Dead and announced that it wouldn’t be long before Google+ surpassed Flickr in pages views for photo sharing. While I think that it’s going to take a while to fully see this happen, I think we’ve already begun seeing this move by many of the top photographers on Flickr away from Flickr and Facebook and over to Google+. If you are a serious social photographer on the web, you simply cannot afford NOT to have a presence on Google+.

Now think about this. Google+ is only about 2 months old. It’s still invite only and in beta. See how fast momentum can change on the web.

So why is Google+ doing so well with photo sharing with web enthusiasts?

Here is what I think.

1. The photos look GREAT. Facebook’s already tried to revamp to try to keep up with Google here, but it’s nowhere near enough. On Google+ you get great big oversized thumbnails in your stream (did you hear that Facebook? GREAT BIG OVERSIZED THUMBNAILS IN YOUR STREAM).

When you click through to a photo it instantly bursts into the best looking lightbox view on the web.

2. Photos on Google+ get way more engagement and interaction, for the photographers that put the effort in. Almost every photographer who has put the effort in at G+ has gotten way more engagement than any other site. I’ve never seen anything like the engagement photos get on G+ — new photographers and popular photographers alike.

Some people have told me that they still get more on Flickr. But keep in mind, some of these people are not really putting hardcore effort into Google+ yet and also they’ve been on Flickr for years in some cases and haven’t even been on G+ 2 months yet. Give it time though — here are some handy tips to build a bigger audience for your work on G+.

3. The photographic community on Google+ has the best positive vibe and the photo community is coming together there in the most amazing ways.

I quit all of the flickr groups where I was active over the course of the last month or so because I got tired of all the negativity, tired of the harassing anonymous trolls, tired of the pessimism. On Google+ everybody seems super friendly and positive and the photographic community is coming together in the most beautiful ways all over the world.

I love how much better I’ve gotten to know Trey Ratcliff through Google+. I knew Trey before from Flickr, but Google+ has helped us to become even closer and better friends. He stayed at my house the last time he was in town and we did a super fun Google+ hangout that night online. I love seeing photographers all over the world that seem to be coming together on Google+ and organizing photowalks, and critique clubs and things like self portrait Sundays, and all these other fun community sort of things.

I love seeing the new leaders in photography that are popping up on Google+ — people like Lotus Carroll in Austin, or Leanne Staples and Vivienne Gucwa in New York. Lisa Bettany and Catherine Hall from TWiT Photo are super active. Colby Brown‘s been a huge leader. Robert Scoble is constantly sharing so many new photographers on the site. Robert must have shared 5 new awesome kick ass photographers in his stream just yesterday including Mihailo Radičević (check him out, he’s crazy good).

I love seeing Elena Kalis and her great underwater work. I love seeing Adobe Pro Jan Kabili sharing great Lightroom and Photoshop tips with us.

Did I mention the Google+ photowalks have been awesome! (Come join us for a Dell/Google+ photowalk in Austin next week too!)

And I myself have been making so many great new local photography friends through G+, hanging out more with folks like Doug Kaye, who I knew before but hadn’t shot with, or Sly Vegas who just started out with photography six months ago and already is an up and coming superstar on G+. Or Karen Hutton or Samir Osman. I’m making so many great new local photography friends through G+

4. The Googlers. I cannot believe how different night/day Google staff is from Flickr’s staff. Google’s staff embraces you and your art as part of the community collaboratively. I’ve been so fortunate to have met so many great Googlers over the course of the past few months. Chris Chabot, Brian Rose, Vincent Mo, Dave Cohen, Natalie Villalobos, Timothy Jordan, and Ricardo Lagos. They hired my pal Louis Gray the other day. (I’ve met so many more cool Googlers and I wish there was room to name even more). And the guys running Google+, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz are two of the most involved people in the community.

You want to hear a crazy story? The other night I was hanging out in my basement editing photos, and who invites me to a Google+ Hangout? Sergey Brin himself. The guy who co-founded Google. I felt like one of those guys who got a Steve Jobs email or something.

We chatted for a good half hour about Google+ and Google Photos and of course lots of talk about photography. We both have the same camera, the Canon 5D Mark 2 and we talked about lenses and making big prints and all sorts of great photography stuff.

Meanwhile, Carol Bartz who was fired over at Yahoo yesterday, never even had her own flickr account. I have no idea who’s even running flickr and I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke with someone who works there. It’s been years for sure.

5. Google is innovating with photos like CRAZY. It’s a wonderful perpetual beta. Sure my +1′s disappear sometimes. Who cares. Sure there are bumps. It’s beta software that’s only been out a couple of months. But every week Google is rolling out more and more improvements to the site with no sign of slowing down. Heck just a few hours ago they gave us a new improvement for locking our photo albums.

6. The Hangouts. I LOVE hangouts. They are such a better way to get to know other photographers. Last night about eight of us just got together for an hour or so and talked about all kinds of great photographic ideas.

We talked about taking a trip to go shoot Bodie at night. We talked about the economy where Helen Sotiriadis was there in Greece. We talked about how unfortunately Jonathan Goody had his 50mm 1.4 lens damaged at Burning Man when it got knocked out of his hand in a bar. We talked about light painting the inside of a submarine and the time that Jeremy Brooks and I lightpainted this great old phone booth. Hangouts are so cool that we even got my old Pal Marc Evans to actually hook up a webcam (although he did have to find the right Windows 98 drivers).

Hangouts are an awesome easy way to connect and become even better friends with your photography buddies. These blow the conversations I’ve had in flickr groups away, complete with audio and video.

A shout out too to Shirley Lo, the queen of the Google+ hangouts — and sorry I can’t name about 10,000 mind blowing insanely talented photographers on Google+. There are so, so many and it’s because of all of you why I think the numbers are trending so high for Google+ being the great new place on the web to share photos.

The other day I tweeted out the number one photo on Flickr’s Explore. It was a popular tweet. Out of the millions of photos that get uploaded to Flickr every single day, this photo was the one that Flickr felt was the absolute most awesomest photo on all of Flickr.

Nothing against the photo linked above, or the photographer who captured both a puppy and a full moon at *exactly* the same time, but it wasn’t what I would have picked as the number one most interesting photo on Flickr.

Different strokes for different folks though as the saying goes.

Along with others, I’ve abandoned flickr’s Explore section as a sort of cheesy photo watermark ghetto, but it remains a popular place across the network. If Flickr cared about innovating, there are lots of ways that they could improve this area, but that’s another conversation.

What I want to talk about today is how other companies that *are* innovating like Google Photos and 500px might build a better photo recommendation engine.

I do believe that all photo sharing sites need a photo recommendation area. We all love to look at engaging photography and it’s a useful tool to find new and interesting photographers to follow as well as to see better work uploaded by people on the site.

The number one problem with most photo recommendation engines is that they are the exact same recommendations for every individual. If you go to flickr’s Explore page, it is the exact same 100 photos for everybody, everyday. It doesn’t matter what sort of photography *you* like. It doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter what you fave.

Dumb algorithms that don’t take into consideration available data for personalization are not as good as smart algorithms that do.

So what should a smarter photo recommendation search engine do?

1. Don’t show me blocked content. Any accounts that I block should not appear in the recommendation engine for me. If I’m blocking an account it’s for a reason — maybe the person is a stalker/harasser, maybe the person puts 24 point Helvetica copyright watermarks over every single picture that make me want to vomit, maybe the individual focuses on a niche that I’m not interested in — whatever. I don’t want to see it and I shouldn’t have to see it if I’ve gone through enough trouble to block somebody. Google’s new Ignore setting should also be a strong signal.

2. Analyze my fave/+1 vs. view ratio by photographer. Do I +1 100% of a certain photographer’s work? Do I see 100 photos form another photographer and not +1 a single photo? Get to know my faving/+1ing activity and show me more stuff by these photographers that I fave/+1 most. Existing percentage fave/view ratio is a good one to take into consideration.

3. Analyze the tags/keywords on what I’m faving/+1ing. Do I seem to fave/+1 tons of photos of trains? Maybe I’m really into trains. Is graffiti my thing? Do I like abandoned photography? Show me more of this stuff and less puppies and moons.

4. Are there geographical clues that can provide information? What is my fave/view ratio by geographical location? Do I live in San Francisco and fave a higher number of photos in SF? — or maybe I live in SF and I’m sick of it and fave a lower number of photos.

Maybe I dream about laying on my stomach on a glacier in Antartica and fave a much higher rate of photos taken there. Everybody’s different.

5. What can my google/flickr search activity tell you about me? Do I search for neon signs a lot? Do I search especially for “San Francisco” AND “neon”? Maybe a neon sign in San Francisco with only 5 faves should be shown to me before showing me a photo of a puppy and a photoshopped moon with 100 faves.

6. New users should be able to provide input to a recommendation engine. You’d be surprised the sort of things people will personally voluntarily tell you. Does someone like Creative Commons photos more than all rights reserved? Do they care about watermarks? Do they LOVE them? Do the HATE them? Do they prefer local photos? Or do they want more travel abroad photos? How might they rate subject matter on a slider from one to ten? If some users *want* to provide this, use this data as a jumping off point for the recommendation engine.

Do they want to see artistic nudes? (This one is big as it represents a big genre in social photo sharing). Google+ also needs to get this figured out.

7. Don’t use the engine to blacklist. Currently Flickr blacklists certain members. This is bad for community. Blacklisting certain members creates enormous ill will.

Once a smarter recommendation engine is built around photographs customized to me it should be presented to me in a prominent place.

On Google+ specifically I’d recommend adding it as a link under the section to the left of the photo’s displayed on the photos tab in G+. Right now they have “photos from your circles” “photos from your phone” “photos of you” and “your albums” there.

I think they should add a menu item and call it Awesomeness (or whatever). Obviously they can’t call it “Explore,” but they can come up with something better.

From that menu item you should be able to expand it with a little triange and then filter the recommendation engine by circle.

Overall comments and faves/+1s should still factor heavily into any algorithm — but every user should get a unique set of photos tailored to their taste and input into the system.

Google could also play around with ranking incentives.

When Flickr first launched geotagging, I suggested to Stewart Butterfield that Flickr should tell users that geotagged photos would be rated higher in Explore if that was activity that flickr wanted to encourage (and they *should*) and flickr actually did end up doing this.

Similarly Google+ may want to consider what sort of activity they want to promote with photo ranking. Certainly social activity itself should rank high. If a user is uber social maybe their photos should rank higher — they are of more value to your network perhaps than someone that just pumps in flickr photos and never engages.

Likewise, metadata should be rewarded — both keywords and geotags. This is valuable information for Google to use in other ways and for search in the future.

A side note about negative voting systems in social networks. 500px currently employs a negative voting system with their photographs. You can essentially anonymously vote down a photo. They have some tools put in place to prevent mass downvoting and other abuses of the system and seem to feel that having access to this data is helpful for serving up great photographs (and they do a good job at that).

My own advice though is to to kill it. The problem is not that negative voting systems don’t provide valuable information. The problem is not that they are being abused. The problem is not in negative votes themselves, but rather their perception and people’s reactions to them.

It’s the same thing that hurt digg in my opinion. At digg a user would submit a story, they would watch it rise up the charts, and then just before it would hit the front page it would be killed. Boom. Buried. Gone.

Because burying on digg is anonymous (like 500px) it leaves people to suspect the worst. Was there a coordinated effort by people who hate me to bury my story? Was there a coordinated effort by those that wanted to see their own content have a better chance that killed it? This speculation is a negative input for a user. It’s probably the number one complaint I’ve heard about 500px and I know it’s kept some users away. I’m not sure the value of the data and information outweighs the negative feelings it provides to some in the community.

If you *absolutely* must have a negative voting system. Take away the anonymity. Of course this would also take away 98% of the down votes as well though.