Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

My photostream and the new Flickr splash screen for their new iPhone app.

Hot damn. Well Christmas is coming early this year for Flickr iPhone users. This morning Flickr is rolling out a brand spanking new Flickr iPhone app and it is that good — really, really, really, really mind blowingly fantastic good. It not only smokes every other previous mobile version of Flickr it smokes every other mobile photo sharing app on the market today.

I had some time to play around with the app yesterday and it is pretty much does 100% exactly what you’d want a Flickr mobile app to do. It’s nice to finally see a decent Instagram competitor out there.

First the basics. The app takes photos. It has some pretty good simple editing tools powered by Aviary. You can crop photos, straighten photos, increase contrast, stuff like this. You can select different points for focus and exposure when you snap your photo. You can then apply one of about 15 different Instagrammy sort of filters that are all named after animals in the app. This stuff is probably super important to the average minor league user, but is actually pretty boring to me. It’s a solid decent camera app.

Where the app starts to get exciting for me though is the browsing of photos. Here Flickr delivers and delivers big. The best basic view is of your contacts’ most recent photos. As you vertical scroll down the screen it shows the last photos uploaded by all your favorite people that you follow. You can just keep scrolling down the page (infinitely) to see new photos by all your contacts or at any individual contact you can stop and start scrolling horizontally (infinitely) to go through their entire photostream, very, very fast.

Browsing group discussions and faving a contacts’ photo in the new Flickr iPhone app.

For newer users who don’t have a lot of contacts yet that might browse through their entire contacts list, new recommended photographers are added so that a user never runs out of contacts’ photos to see. Who and how these individuals are selected and included is Flickr secret sauce, but it should make sure that you never have a shortage of photos to see even if you’re new.

EVEN BETTER. Tap tap = fave. Yep, Instagram gave us the first big fave inflation tool by allowing us to tap tap fave our way through life and Flickr now has adopted that protocol allowing you to tap tap fave photos by all your favorite photographers.

What does this mean? It means that all of a sudden you are going to start noticing a ton more faves on your Flickr photos. Every time your friends have 10 minutes in line at the bakery they are going to be all up in your Flickrstream faving things like crazy. It’s so easy now. Flickr is also now going to begin counting mobile views of your photos as views for your photo stats (previously mobile views were not counted) so expect both the views and faves on your photos to sky rocket.

In addition to viewing your contacts’ most recent photos and going fave bombastic Billy Wilson style you’re also now able to view all kinds of other areas of Flickr in a beautiful mosaic photo layout — your own photostream and sets, group photo pools, other people’s sets, Explore, all have a justified photo layout that just invite you to go tap tap crazy.

Speaking of Flickr groups, with this new app Flickr introduces a really nice basic thread reader that will allow you to stay on top of all of your favorite threads while you’re mobile. The reader is super simple and does exactly what it’s supposed to do, it lets you easily read your threads and respond if you want from mobile. The previous version of Flickr’s mobile app lacked this important feature. Some of Flickr’s biggest power users live in these threads and this is an important improvement because it will help keep people plugged into their Flickr groups more often.

Another nice feature of the new app is that if you want to see any photo you are looking at full screen size you just tilt your iphone sideways and the photo immediately fills up the entire screen. You can then swipe from photo to photo as you scroll your way through whatever stream, set, group, etc. you are in. Flickr also uses a larger higher res version of your photo for this view so you get to see the photo with amazing clarity even if you pinch in to see a section in detail.

Flickr also includes lots of other detail on a photo page that you can access if you want to see it — EXIF data, location data, people tags, etc. Flickr also partnered with Foursquare to give you a list of venues to easily geotag your own photos as you upload them.

Flickr photos are now full-sized when you share them to Facebook and Twitter — before vs. after.

What about sharing your photos beyond Flickr? Yes! What about sharing your photos beyond Flickr? With the new Flickr app you can now share your Flickr photos to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or by email. Where it gets exciting though is how your photos are shared on these other sites. Beginning today, photos shared from Flickr to Facebook will now be shared full sized just like your Facebook photos are. In the past Flickr photos were given the downsized thumbnail treatment. Now your Flickr photos shared to Facebook will look as gloriously large as your photos shared directly on Facebook. This not only applies for your photos shared from the new app by the way, but from your photos shared via the web as well.

Likewise Flickr has now adopted Twitter’s envelope and your Flickr photos posted to Twitter will be seen full sized as well. What Twitter/Instagram taketh away Twitter/Flickr giveth back.

A Flickr set and editing a photo in the new Flickr iPhone app.

The only downside to today’s announcement is that as is usually the case, iPhone users get all the love while us Android fan boys get left out in the cold yet again. Flickr Product Head Markus Spiering did confirm that Flickr is working on future versions of their app for both Android and iPad though and said that Flickr hoped to have feature parity with today’s new iPhone app, but couldn’t confirm what the time frame might be on these future apps. He did emphasize that Flickr and Yahoo both are very committed to mobile going forward.

Flickr is also rolling out a few new enhancements to the web version of Flickr today as well. They’ve redesigned the global navigation and menus so that they are more intuitive and added their new justified photo view that they’ve been rolling out to various areas earlier this year to Explore. Explore is much easier to browse now as one big infinite scroll mosaic to go through each day. Hopefully Flickr’s awesome justified photo mosaic layout will be coming to sets and search next.

The new Flickr for iPhone app is available to download in Apple App Store this morning. Run, don’t walk and get it NOW! Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

Stephen Shankland’s review over at CNET here. Review at the Next Web here. A blog post from the Flickr blog here.

Update: Pro Tip. Anil Dash points out that with the new “Find Friends” feature on the app you can find Facebook and Twitter friends’ flickr accounts that you may not know about. Try this feature and you many find a whole bunch of new Flickr contacts to add.

Video on the new Flickr app.

An interesting article over on TechCrunch about Yahoo buying a company called OnTheAir. The company makes a hangout app similar to Google+’s hangouts that lets people interact via video voice and chat. The OntheAir team is coming to work on mobile at Yahoo under Adam Cahan — the same Adam Cahan who is also the Yahoo exec in charge of Flickr (and who just went public with his own personal Flickr account this weekend — welcome to Flickr Adam!).

Google Hangouts have been one of the killer features for community as far as photographers go on Google+. Many photographers have produced hangout based shows — but more than anything they are a place where photographers who kinda/sorta get to know each other on the web and through commenting on each other’s photos, can get to know each other much better live. Earlier this week I wrote an article about photographers Brian Matiash and Nicole S. Young who actually met on a Google+ Hangout and ended up married.

Google+ Hangouts are powerful tools for community building most of all. There’s something about spending time with someone in video/voice that strengthens the resulting online bonds around a website after the fact. While community has been growing at Google+, community has been slipping at Flickr. The real hardcore community on Flickr mostly takes place in Flickr groups which feel like they are dying. Most groups on Flickr are far less active than they were two years ago.

Flickr would seem to me like an ideal place for Yahoo to build out hangouts. They tried a horrible feature called Photo Session where two people could go into a chat room and doodle on photos while they chatted together last year that they subsequently cancelled, but that feature was nowhere near the experience that a Google Hangout is. It makes me wonder if Yahoo couldn’t seed some of the initial push towards a hangout product through some of the key remaining groups on Flickr to see if they couldn’t get some traction with this product there.

Getting people more connected around a website is a powerful tool to making them stickier more impassioned users. The other thing that video chat does is it causes people to be nicer to each other. One of Flickr’s current problems with their groups is that there are a lot of jerks in them. People in Flickr groups seem to pride themselves on being mean, or snide or snarky. This drives people away. Allowing people in groups to block each other would help a ton with this problem, but getting people to see each other as real human beings through video chat sessions is also helpful. I’m always amazed at how much nicer people are to each other on Flickr once they’ve actually met in real life.

For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about online conversations. It feels like I’m constantly in one somewhere on some site.

More and more for me these are happening on Google+. I used to spend almost all of my social time online in Flickr group discussion threads. I stopped visiting Flickr groups for a while due to personal harassment — but you know what, it wasn’t just me who left, the velocity of quality conversations in Flickr groups have gone wayyyy down more broadly speaking in the past year.

This is not just a subjective thing — it’s easily measured ojbectively as well. Flickr Central is one of the oldest/largest/most active groups on Flickr. Over there years (as counted by threads) 11,503 conversations that have gone on there. Some are very successful, some are not.

If you look at Flickr Central today you’ll see that the time stamp for discussions on the first page goes back two weeks. This was not always the case. It used to be that the entire first page of discussions in Flickr Central were from the past 48 hours. Clearly the velocity of conversations in this Flickr group has gone way down. I suspect the same goes for other groups as well. Many of the groups recommended to me as “groups that Flickr has noticed” on the groups page haven’t had conversations in months, in some cases even years.

Meanwhile, over at Google+, in the past year I’ve been involved in some of the best conversations that I ever remember happening anywhere on the web. Interesting conversations about photography and art and meetups and hangouts and all kinds of fun things. it seems like there is always some great conversation somewhere on Google+ to jump into.

Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve jumped back into a few Flickr conversations to see what it feels like. What I’ve noticed is that the tone of conversations on Google+ feels so much more positive than it does at Flickr. There’s so much less snark and bitterness and negativity overall. I hadn’t seen the difference so dramatically before, but after having been gone awhile it felt more evident.

This made me think about what Google+ was doing right for community that Flickr is not.

When I first joined Google+ one of the things that I noticed is that some of the more hostile individuals from many of the old Flickr groups showed up. Some personal attacks took place, they aired their gripes about different things, typical BS hater stuff — but you know what? These people were quickly marginalized and moved out of the way to create a more positive environment. I blocked many of these people and so did so many other photographers on G+.

A few weeks went by and these people were just as hostile and negative but they were basically shouting to an empty room. The majority of positive forward thinking photographers on G+ had tuned them out with the tools that we were given. What we were left with was a more positive filtered G+ experience. I went back a few days ago to look at a few of the accounts of people that I blocked and you know what — they are gone. They quit G+. By empowering a mostly positive oriented community these people found no audience to bitch at and they left. Meanwhile, more constructive social photographers on G+ carry on.

Now, one worry with filtering out criticism is that it hurts meaningful conversation because all conversation is not always puppy dogs and roses, but that also hasn’t happened on Google+. Lots of criticism has gone on in tons of threads. The difference is though that the criticism feels much more respectful than some of what I’ve experienced in Flickr groups. People disagree on Google+ they just do it respectfully.

By giving users more powerful blocking tools on G+ Google has built a nicer community. A nicer community feels so much more enjoyable.

Every so often I’ll find someone new who comes along and leaves some sort of assholish comment in a thread on Google+. It’s almost delightful at how easy it is to block them and make them invisible.

In poking around Flickr Groups over the past week I did find what felt like some high quality conversations to me, I read them, I lurked — but I didn’t participate. The reason why I didn’t participate was that I noticed some of the toxic types that I’d run into previously on Flickr or G+. I’m sure I would have jumped into these conversations if I hadn’t seen them there, but what’s the point of jumping into a conversation about fine art photography when you know someone is just going to be a jerk?

Update 12-01-2012, I think Yahoo Exec Adam Cahan just went public with a Flickr account.

Update 12-12-2012. Marissa Mayer just went public with her Flickr account today as well here.

Late last week over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher reported on the appointment of the latest high profile Yahoo exec, Adam Cahan. In addition to reporting directly into Marissa Mayer and overseeing mobile for Yahoo (super important!) it was also announced that Cahan would be put in charge of Flickr, the photo sharing site that so many of us love.

On the surface this is great news. The fact that the guy who is now overseeing Flickr reports directly into Mayer may mean that Flickr’s profile is moving up internally at Yahoo. After a few years of Flickr layoffs and shrinking, it looks like Yahoo once again is staffing up in photo sharing!

In addition to staffing up, over the past year Yahoo has probably improved Flickr more than any other year in its existence. They’ve added a really nice new justified page layout for your contact’s photos and favorites (hopefully coming to search, photostreams and sets soon!), they added a new meet up page where they are getting active with photowalks again (check out this shot from their Austin photowalk this past weekend), they created a new liquid photo format that expands photos to the size of your monitor (slick!), they also increased the maximum size for photos for paid accounts to 50MB! (Facebook and Google+ downsize your photos).

So my question is, why with so much excitement going on around Flickr, why don’t Yahoo employees use or care more about the service?

A lesser known thing about Adam Cahan, the new Yahoo exec in charge of Flickr, is that according to the San Jose business Journal he’s a former National Geographic wildlife photographer. So here’s the guy who is in charge of Flickr, definitely talented with a camera, and where is he choosing to share *his* photographs? Yep, you guessed it Google+! Here’s a photo he posted earlier this year there for the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Of course, Cahan is just following by example really here, his boss Marissa Mayer chooses to post her own photos over at Instagram instead of Flickr.

Why is Flickr such a pariah that Yahoo’s own executives (even the one directly in charge of Flickr) won’t dare to use it personally?

Certainly Google and Facebook employees share their photos on Google+ and Facebook. So why aren’t Yahoo executives doing the same thing?

I believe that leadership is done by example. I also believe that every company should encourage dogfooding and should encourage their employees to use their own products. I think this sends a better message to users when you feel like people who work for the company use it too.

The message that Mayer and Cahen send when they shun Flickr and instead post their photos on competing photo sharing sites is that those sites are better than Flickr. The exact message that they should be trying to change if they really care about Flickr.

Now I’m all for Yahoo executives testing out the competition. Actually I think that’s smart. They *should* have accounts on Instagram and Google+ and Facebook and all that — but they should *also* have accounts at Flickr and they should be acting as Flickr’s biggest cheerleaders in the same way that Vic Gundotra does for Google+ over there.

There is a current conversation going on over at Flickr in their highest profile discussion group that Flickr is dying. Yahoo should care about discussions like this. Yahoo employees should actually be involved in them and trying to convince people that Flickr is not dying, that a comeback is just around the corner — but in order to be involved in conversations like this Yahoo employees need to actually, you know, have an actual Flickr account.

It’s not hard, really, you can even use your Facebook or Google+ account to sign into Flickr these days. Directly from the Flickr sign up page: “It takes less than a minute to create your free account & start sharing! Have a Google or Facebook account? You can use them to sign in!”

Flickr’s tagline is “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” That’s been it’s tagline for years now. So if this is true, why don’t Yahoo execs want to use it to manage and share their photos? If that tagline isn’t true anymore maybe Yahoo execs should think about changing it to “almost certainly *was* the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”

I was thinking yesterday back to all the excitement that was around Flickr back in the olden days. Natural disasters tend to be things that galvanize social sharing, and especially photos. Back in 2005 when Katrina hit, Flickr was the go to place for people to post photos online about the disaster. Not only were the best user generated photos flowing into Flickr, they were flowing in fast and furious. Flickr was recognized for the Katrina photos in the national press. A group was started on Flickr to do a print auction to raise funds for Katrina survivors. The very next year Time Magazine named Flickr co-Founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake as two of the 100 most influential people in the world! Butterfield and Fake both had Flickr accounts by the way.

More recently hurricane Sandy hit New York. Was Flickr the go to place this time for photos? No. Everywhere you went in the national press it was 24/7 Instagram. It’s telling that Time Magazine — the very same Time Magazine that recognized Flickr and their founders/managers after Hurricane Katrina — recruited five professional photographers this time around to cover hurricane Sandy for them on… Instagram, the same photo sharing site where Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shares her photos.

By the way, photos taken after Oct 15th tagged Sandy on Flickr? 36,000. Photos tagged Sandy on Instagram? Over 800,000. Now just today Instagram announced photos on the web.

On a personal level, my photos at Facebook and Google+ get far more views and engagement than they do on Flickr — not just a little more, a lot more — as in hundreds of times more. I’m still rooting for Flickr though. They were the photo sharing service that I started out with back in 2004. They still have the best photo organizational tools on the web and at $25 for over 70,000 full high res photos of mine they are a bargain. Competition in the photo sharing space is good for all of us. It benefits the user. I just wish I felt like Yahoo actually wanted to win more with Flickr. Maybe this will change though and some day soon I’ll be able to add Mayer and Cahan as contacts of mine on Flickr. I bet as a former National Geographic pro Cahan has got some great shots.

PetaPixel / Gizmodo

Comments on this post at Google+.

One of the things that I dislike about Flickr’s Explore algorithm is that it shows me so many photos that I’m not interested in. It seems like every time I go there I end up with a hodgepodge of photos that I dislike — overwatermarked, overcooked, etc. I’ve always been interested in is a version of Explore that would filter out everyone on Flickr except for my contacts. Over the years I’ve managed both my contacts and friends/family list to my own personal taste as a consumer of photography.

The most popular way to view your contacts’ photos of course is on the “Photos From Your Contacts” page. This page shows you the last 1 or 5 (you choose) photos by your contacts or friends/family (again you choose). So you basically have four different ways to view your contacts’ photos, but all four are by recency only.

Sometimes you might want to look at photos by your contacts in ways other than recency. Over the years I’ve added a ton of people as contacts — so many in fact that there is just no way that I can keep up with every single photo every single contact posts every single day. So instead of the recency view I’ve been looking for other ways that I can look at my contacts’ photos.

After playing around with Flickr’s advanced search page this weekend, I figured out how I can view my contacts’ photos by interestingness instead of only recency. This is helpful if you want to see what are the best (most popular) photos by your contacts over past period of times. Flickr’s interestingness algorithm gives every photo on flickr a hidden internal score. This score is based on lots of factors including how many favorites a photo gets, how many comments a photo gets, tags, where it’s posted on the web outside of Flickr, etc. The basic premise though is that the more activity a photo receives the more interesting a photo might be.

Advanced search on Flickr lets you customize your search criteria and seems to even work with empty search queries (which seem to return all photos). You can customize the search page to only search using your contacts photos and you can customize it by past time periods. So if you want to run through all of your contacts’ photos by the last day, week, month, etc. and have them ranked by the most popular photos to see if you’ve missed any great photos you can do that using this page.

The way Flickr returns photos in search is a little clunky and is not as elegant as the justified view for photos on your contacts most recent photo page, but I bet search results on Flickr end up with a justified view at some point in the future as well. A photo wall that you can favorite from is a much superior/engaging layout after all.

Anyways, these links below should work for you as well and allow you to see the most popular photos by your contacts and friends/family over previous time periods. If you command/click (Mac) on a thumbnail it will open it in another window and then you can just tab through these windows to fave/comment/view larger any of the photos you have an interest in.

Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts July 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family July 2012

Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family YTD
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts YTD

For some reason, some searches using empty queries on flickr for earlier time spans (like all of 2011) produced no photos for me, so something must have changed with how Flickr handles empty queries after 2011.

I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to search empty queries from the advanced search page. I tried to go use the wayback machine at the Internet archive to see what this page looked like in the past but apparently Flickr is blocking the internet archive from indexing this page (and other pages as well, including one specific group, which seemed odd).

[Update: The Marissa Mayer account is now down off of Flickr and it shows that this user is no longer active. It could be that somebody was impersonating her. Impersonation is against the Flickr rules and can result in you having your account deleted. I haven't heard back definitively yet from Flickr one way or the other whether or not this was a legitimate Marissa Mayer Flickr account].

Update #2: This would appear to be the first official photo of Flickr Staff with new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

Woah! Welcome to Flickr Marissa Mayer!

Pretty much ever since the day Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO I’ve been doing a search for her name as a member of Flickr. I’ve been heavily invested both in terms of personal energy and emotion in Flickr as a place to showcase my photography on the web and have been critical over the years of how Yahoo executive leadership has handled the site.

More recently I watched as Mayer posted her personal photography on Instagram as Yahoo’s new CEO and felt that as the new leader of Flickr that she should post her work to Flickr instead. It’s not that you shouldn’t be trying outside products as a CEO, but it’s also important for perception that you support your own products as well — dogfooding and all that. Mayer’s new Flickr account sends a powerful and positive message both to Flickr’s staff as well as to Flickr’s users.

I’ve written several open letters to Yahoo CEOs criticizing them for not understanding the potential that Flickr is and can be. On a more personal level I’ve criticized them for not even bothering to set up a Flickr account for themselves. Everybody has photos to share, even CEOs. Neither of Mayer’s predecessors, Scott Thompson or Carol Bartz ever set up a Flickr account that I was aware of — at least one that was viewable from public search — although someone did set up a joke Carol Bartz account.

So I was pleasantly surprised today that when I did my usual search for Marissa Mayer on Flickr and up popped her brand spanking new Flickr account. As an added bonus, when I went to her first photo in her stream I found that I was both the first person to view the photo and the first person to fave the photo (see screenshot above). I’m assuming that this is really her account and not some fake account that someone set up — and if it is her new account, in my book this is very positive for Flickr.

Over the past few Yahoo administrations Flickr has been shrinking. They endured layoffs and a lot of criticism on the web for failing to innovate. Now the ship seems to be turning around. Instead of laying people off, Flickr is in fact *hiring*. Not only are they hiring, they are staffing up big time. Look at all of these jobs that they have open right now — everything from frontend engineers to community managers.

Although I don’t know his source, my good friend Robert Scoble posted today that he’s heard that Mayer had *doubled* the size of Flickr’s staff in the past week! Woah! If this is true, this is significant and it means that Mayer clearly sees the value of social in Flickr and the importance of photography to the social web going forward.

Over the past year I’ve gotten to know Flickr’s new Product Chief Markus Spiering a little better. I’ve been impressed with his commitment and desire to improving Flickr. Earlier this year he penned a blog post on the Flickr blog promising us innovation in the coming year and to date has pushed some impressive updates to the site.

The biggest improvement in my opinion under Spiering’s tenure is the new justified layout that Flickr has shipped. This new layout allows you to view group photos, your contacts’ photos and your and others’ favorites in a much more elegant mosaic layout. It allows you to easily hover over each photo to favorite it if you want to — wonderful social lubrication. I suspect that this awesome new layout will come to other areas of the site in the future. I’m particularly excited about the possibility of the new justified layout coming to the sets view. Despite competition from Google+, Facebook and Instagram, Flickr still remains one of the most robust places online to organize your photos and sets/collections are the cornerstone of this ability. I’ve got over 1,700 sets now on Flickr and I’d LOVE to view them in the justified view.

What else has Flickr done so far this year? They added new liquid photos. If you haven’t viewed a Flickr photo on a 27 inch display yet, go do it now. It looks so great when photos auto expand to bigger versions on bigger displays.

Flickr’s also increased their maximum photo size this year to 50MB from 20MB previously (for Pro accounts). Both Facebook and Google+ downsize your photos. This is especially more noticeable now on the new Apple retina displays. Photos look much better on Flickr than Google+ and Facebook because Flickr uses higher resolution originals than Facebook or Google+. Along with the new larger size limits Flickr shipped a strong new uploading tool as well.

Flickr also did an important deal with Pinterest that ensured that Flickr photos would receive proper attribution on the popular scrapbooking site and links driving valuable traffic back to Flickr user’s streams. They also ran a serious of photowalks and set up a new Meetup site dedicated to Flickr photowalks.

Flickr still has a lot of work to do — mobile is a mess, groups need a lot of work still — but with executive support, a bigger team, strong leadership and positive forward momentum, these things can all be done.

I’ve reached out to Flickr to confirm that this Marissa Mayer account is really hers. I’m hopeful that the answer comes back as yes, and look forward to seeing the great things that she will continue to do to improve the site under her tenure.

Welcome to Flickr Ms. Mayer!

Probably the number one thing that Yahoo has squandered over the years is the early mover advantage that they had when they bought Flickr and along with it one of the best basic frameworks for group social networking on the web today.

Flickr groups are a potentially powerful social network, even more powerful in fact than Flickr itself as a photo sharing platform. Instead of recognizing and exploiting the full potential of Flickr groups, groups have been left behind to languish in a new more nimble mobile world of instant communication.

Yahoo never even understood what they had. They barely understood Flickr, how could they understand an obscure part of Flickr and the seed for greatness that existed there? Carol Bartz, Scott Thompson (and now Marissa Mayer) couldn’t/can’t even be bothered to set up Flickr accounts.

Today more powerful, wealthy, and connected internet businesses are rapidly building out group oriented features (Google+ Events for example) that will further diminish Yahoo’s potential in the social networking space. Yahoo still does have a chance to try to turn Flickr groups into something larger, but the time is short. Understanding the power of Flickr groups means actually spending time using it and studying it. Like her predecessors, we can’t even get Marissa Mayer to open up her own Flickr account, so my outlook for Flickr groups is not great.

Those that have lived in Flickr groups for various periods of time over the past 8 years know exactly what I am talking about. They know how powerful groups can be. This small population of outliers on the web know that for many of them Flickr groups have been the most addictive thing they have ever experienced on the web — more addictive than Facebook, more addictive than Google+, more addictive than any social experience on the web for them ever. Groups of tight knit communities have flourished in obscurity on Flickr but have resulted in some of the most significant offline real life communication and life involvement for those who know.

The power of Flickr groups is that they allow small interest groups (that oftentimes end up transcending their own interest and purpose for existence) to turn into tightly knit communities — strangers bonding in ways that are unusual for the internet. A lot is said about how busy people are today, and people are — but at the same time people are basically bored and lonely. As connected as we are with people that we know, we thirst for more. We thirst for real interaction on the web. “Nice photo,” “wow,” “excellent composition,” are not what we are really after. We are after something deeper — something more real, authentic and meaningful. We long for connection. We thrive for real understanding and admiration. We want to belong to associations. We’ve lost touch with our churches and political parties and social clubs and even our families at times. In our isolation the web becomes our new wild, wild west. We seek connection and group association even if we do not realize it. We want to belong.

Exploring the full potential of Flickr groups and how this structure and format can be improved upon should be a major directive of Marissa Mayer. If Yahoo cares about social networking (and they should) this is where they need to start.

The power of Flickr groups basically comes down to one thing. The threads are super easy to read, bumped and interactive. Simplicity really is the power of groups as much as anything.

Below is a roadmap for how to unleash the real power of Flickr groups. As part of a longer-term plan, Yahoo needs to figure out how to roll out the group framework on Flickr to every single property on Yahoo.

1. Flickr needs more robust blocking tools. If people are going to get up in each other’s grill, they will eventually get up in each other’s grill. If groups are going to bring people to extreme levels of connection, inevitably there will be the destroyers. The basic group format allows group administrators to remove pariahs from the group experience, but this is not enough. Those in the know understand that destroying a group is largely a matter of will power. With the ability to install an unlimited army of Flickr troll accounts who can wreck havoc on a group experience, many have abandoned Flickr groups for this simple reason alone.

Google+ and Facebook understand the need for true and complete blocking. When you block someone on Google+ they are 98% gone. The blocking action renders them invisible to you anywhere in the network. Occasionally you are puzzled when you see the mention of someone’s name in a thread and then you remember, aha, yes, you’ve blocked that person. Not so with Flickr groups. When you block someone on Flickr they are free to roam any group you are a member of and continue harassing you. This drives the most social among us away. While group administration and Flickr themselves may take action if the harassment is significant enough, this is not adequate. It is not immediate. Even if action is taken, a new troll is quickly introduced to allow the same actions (98% of the time this harassment is done anonymously).

Allowing us control over our Flickr social experience should be the first priority for Flickr. Allowing a complete and total block should have been implemented a long time ago, before so many were driven from the Flickr group experience. If someone does not like someone for any reason whatsover, they should be equipped with a tool to remove them from their personal space — even within a group. A total block has deeper implications than simply removing unwanted harassment from your group experience. A total block introduces the threat of group membership shunning another member. This provides a powerful incentive for a group member to engage in more respectful social engagement and interaction.

2. Flickr groups need a mobile experience. This may need to even be a stand alone application for Android and iOS. Flickr needs to introduce a simple interface that allows you to scroll and fave group photos (Instagram style with easy scrolling and tapping to fave). More significantly though they need to introduce a basic thread reader that is as simple and easy to read and respond to threads on the mobile platform as possible. At present Flickr’s mobile app cannot interact with group threads. Trying to browse group threads on the non-mobile web version of Flickr on a mobile device drives all but the most hardcore away from group threads when they are away from their computer. We are increasingly mobile, a proper addiction should follow you from your computer to your phone. Lost non-computer time reduces engagement. Engagement begets engagement in Flickr group threads and giving people 24/7 access should be a goal.

3. Groups need better filtering tools. The goal should be engagement. Every thread in a group that will not produce engagement is noise and wasted opportunity. Allowing individuals to filter out threads that they do not care about is essential. If I do not like football, I should not have to see the “who will win the superbowl” thread in my social group over and over and over again because other group members want to talk football. This also gives group members a key tool to prevent against thread bumping abuse. Sometimes to make a point, a troll will bump one thread over and over and over again. If members have the power to simply hide that thread, it diminishes the power over the group that a troll will have.

4. Groups need subscriptions. The most active potential users will go to more than one group. They will spend time in several. In order to get someone to return to a group though, there must be a payoff. After checking group threads and finding them inactive 10 times in a row, I will come back less and less over time. Even when a thread I care about is updated, I won’t know because by then I’ve lost interest due to low payoff. By allowing me to subscribe to threads across all Flickr groups I can be assured that if a thread I care about is updated I will see it. A page of all threads that I’m hyper interested in and care the most about will be irresistible to me. If done right, this page could become the most viewed page on all of Flickr. This page would allow faster more frequent responses to powerful group threads. Again, activity begets activity. Faster more frequent payoffs make it more difficult to walk away from the thread experience.

Letting me build my own personalized group forum of threads that I am 100% interested and invested in across all groups on Flickr would significantly increase the chances that I would engage in threads as other activity took place. Zeroing in on the threads that I care most about would perhaps be the most powerful tool of any social network ever. Too often conversations that we care about are lost on the web forever. Bookmarking them and them bumping them based on activity has never been done by anyone that I’m aware of and would represent one of the most powerful tools in social networking ever.

5. Groups need a significant events page. See Google+ for how to do this right.

The internet has spoken and earlier today Flickr officially responded. Their response pretty much sums up the biggest challenge for Flickr/Yahoo going forward, getting people to work there. Flickr desperately needs four things right now: money/resources, engineering talent, design talent, and community management/marketing talent. Money/resources is the easy part, hiring the talent may prove more difficult.

The trend is not Flickr’s friend. According to compete.com over the past year Flickr’s unique U.S. visitors have dropped about 22%. The sad slow decline of Flickr in many ways mirrors the sad slow decline of lots of other properties at Yahoo.

So why should Marissa Mayer make Flickr awesome again and how should she do it?

The number one reason why Marissa should be focusing on Flickr right now is that it is highest visibility, most beloved Yahoo property of all. You didn’t see mass users taking to the internet to tell her to fix Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Sports, or Yahoo Real Estate. No. They came cheering for Flickr. Flickr has deeper emotional and social connections to users than any other Yahoo property. Reinvigorating Flickr should be Marissa’s highest priority because it represents the best possible way for her to send the most visible message that Yahoo is in fact changing, that Yahoo is back in the hunt, that Yahoo cares about their users. It’s going to take work and money but it can be done.

Here is how.

1. It has to start at the top. It’s embarrassing that according to a public search Mayer still doesn’t have a Flickr account. Not only does she not have a Flickr account, she’s using one of Flickr’s most public competitors to share her photos personally. This fact was not lost on me and it wasn’t lost on the financial or tech press. From Bloomberg: “…and, like any proud parent these days, the photo-sharing site she linked to wasn’t Flickr—she used Instagram.” From Wired: “But that’s going to take commitment and outreach from Mayer who, right now, doesn’t even have an account there.” Dog fooding is important. If Flickr Mobile is broken, then Mayer needs to suffer through it with the rest of us and hopefully get it fixed.

2. Flickr needs a big hire in an evangelist role. They need to hire a very visible name that will make the press. Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Trey Ratcliff, Chase Jarvis, or someone of this caliber. They need to make a big splash and they need not only a very visible hire, they need someone who is maniacally (in the good way) connected to social media. They need someone who will eat, breath and sleep Flickr and who will be out promoting the brand everywhere on the web and in person. This person should also host at least one major photo walk in one major city a month. Flickr and Yahoo should leverage their resources to make these walks big splashy public events that make people sit up and notice that Flickr has their mojo back. This person will not be cheap. Yahoo will have to pay up and Mayer herself will probably need to help recruit them.

3. Along with a new Flickr evangelist, Mayer should work with them and Flickr head of product Markus Spiering to heavily and personally recruit some of the top engineers and designers to come to work on Flickr. Flickr should not just be hiring regular old engineers and designers. They should be hiring engineers and designers who are the rock stars. Again, they will have to really pay up for these people — right now the rock star talent wants to work at Facebook and Google, not Yahoo.

If they can get 4 or 5 of these rock star types though they can then use these individuals to recruit even more talent to the Flickr team. Flickr needs to be careful here and not just hire any old engineer who wants a 9 to 5 job. They need to recruit engineers who, like Marissa apparently, want to work it 24/7 and are amazing. They should be rewarded very well and Mayer should use her personal connections to get the right people in these seats.

4. Flickr should begin a structured engagement program with their top users. They should use their internal data at Flickr to see which users are engaging the most and are the most engaged with on Flickr. They should personally contact each of these individuals and make them part of the process for improving Flickr. They should set up a private invite only group where they invite the elite of Flickr, those most heavily invested in Flickr engagement, and personally make them a part of the process going forward.

5. Flickr should set up an ambassador program. They should pay ambassadors $1,000/month (these would not be Flickr employees) to represent Flickr in their respective cities. Part of that responsibility would be to host a photowalk at least once a month (if not more). They would also breath new life into the geographic group best represented on Flickr for their area. Flickr might consider inviting them to San Francisco for an offsite once a year.

6. Engineers/Designers should start working on these problems right away: porting Flickr’s new justified pages to the rest of the site, developing circles for your Flickr contact management, giving people better blocking tools on the site, giving people better filtering tools on the site, creating a cross group subscription system that would aggregate all of the threads you are following in all of your groups and managing these threads as a single forum for you personally, building a first class mobile experience on par with Instagram, and a lot of other things. They should position flickr as a fast moving, innovative, perpetual beta team and Yahoo execs and PR should be cheerleaders with every innovation going forward. Want to see how this is done, just watch Vic Gundotra’s Google+ stream.

7. Yahoo should begin re-evaluating their relationship with Getty Images. Their goal should be to get more photographers paid more money and have more of their photos represented in the Getty Collection. If Yahoo cannot improve this situation in a meaningful way they should consider terminating the Getty relationship, acquiring a smaller stock photography competitor and building this in house. Stock photography should not be considered for what it can add to the bottom line, but for what it can do to recruit the best photographers in the world to post their work on Flickr.

8. Yahoo should heavily promote Flickr with it’s other brands. All other Yahoo properties should begin thinking of how they might incorporate Flickr photos into their properties. Image Search seems like a no brainer. It should be a Yahoo goal to double the amount of Flickr photos in their image search results in the next 60 days. Every site that uses photography on Yahoo should be charged with figuring out a way how to increase Flickr Images in their products. Yahoo may need to develop a sort of opt-in structure for this type of promotion (or better yet an opt out) to deal with photographer’s rights issues and grumpy photographers who might not want their work better promoted and represented on Yahoo, but many will enjoy the extra attention and views and it’s a natural place for Yahoo to go to for imagery.

Mayer needs to hold her new team accountable for the performance of unique users at Flickr. Flickr has been losing unique users and if Flickr is going to seriously compete in the new great big photo sharing world of the WWW, they need to let the photographers of the world know that they are back in a big way and are here to win. Success at Flickr should then be highly promoted by Yahoo PR to show that Yahoo does indeed have their mojo back and that Mayer is in fact winning. More than anything this is the reputation that Yahoo needs to change — excelling at Flickr is one of the best ways that Yahoo can illustrate that to the world. If Yahoo can’t do this then they should just call it a day and sell Flickr to Google now. They will just continue to bleed users and it will be a sore reminder that Yahoo is still languishing every time some new meme about making Flickr awesome again catches the internet’s attention.

Dear Marissa,

Congratulations on your new position with Yahoo. I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and have admired the work that you’ve done there. Google Maps, specifically, has been a big part of my life. Google Maps is the primary reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone in fact. The ability to add my maps as a layer on a mobile device when I go to photograph a new city is, for me, an incredibly important feature.

You’ve done so much more than look after things like maps at Google though and more than anything you understand the culture that has made Google a success and how the web works more broadly speaking.

I’ve written open letters to the last two Yahoo CEOs, Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz. The third time’s a charm, as they say back in business school, so I thought I’d take an opportunity to welcome you to your new position as well. Hopefully, Yahoo got a winner this time — I think that maybe they did.

First of all, my bias — I’m a photographer. I’m also a photographer who has deeply integrated the web into my photography and into my life. I joined Flickr the year they started in 2004, back before the Yahoo acquisition. I’m what they call “old skool” there. Since then I’ve used the site almost every day of my life. I’ve got over 73,000 photos published there now. Over the last 8 years I’ve favorited over 100,000 photos by other photographers. I’ve spent thousands of hours living in groups, forums, sets, and photostreams. I know the site really well.

Although Flickr has been successful in my opinion, it’s only lived up to about 5% of its potential. Flickr had huge, enormous potential when Yahoo bought the site back in 2005. Flickr *could* have been Facebook. I sincerely believe this. Instead it was clumsily duct taped on to the side of Yahoo. It’s founders worked out their contractual obligations of the sale and then bolted. Stewart Butterfield exited with one of the most creative resignation letters ever written in the history of tech — and after that Flickr was left to wither and almost die.

Flickr never died of course, it’s just that through a combination of Flickr management and Yahoo management it was put into deep sleep mode. The fact that for part of this time Flickr was unprofitable probably didn’t really help their chances. Even when Flickr did start to make money, they didn’t make much. Getting bean counters to invest in some grand future of the web was not something that Yahoo did well back then. The good news was that during this period of time Flickr didn’t really have any serious competition. This was also bad news too though because it created a hostile environment with users where we were abused because, well, where else could you go?

Photos are big part of the future of the web. A huge, giant, massive part of the future of the web. You might say photos were the genesis of Facebook. Why did people come to Facebook originally? To see photos.

Over the past few years web companies are finally beginning to understand the importance of photos. Instagram was a huge hit. They did mobile photos right. What Instagram understood was that people wanted to do two things on their mobile device — see photos by their friends and let their friends know that they were watching by sending a positive vibe. So they made the simpliest interface possible to do just that — you just swipe/scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap. This can go on for hours. They also capitalized on this new aesthetic that people have for a vintage film feel with their simple filters and the superiority of the square photo format for presentation.

Google also recognized the potential of photography and, as you know, photos are very deeply integrated into the Google+ experience. What a bunch of winners the team at Google Photos is. Google gave us huge full screen versions of photos first. They gave us great looking photostreams with big oversized thumbnails first. They promoted photographers in big ways. The executives personally reshared our work. They created a special category for photographers on their “Get Started” list. Is it a surprise that so many photographers are so well represented in the 1 million+ follower category on G+? Google understood that integrating beautiful and interesting photos, along with photos by your family and friends, was a way to make G+ more compelling and visually stimulating. Photos completely dominate the new G+ mobile app and tablet app as well.

More than this Google embraced the online photography community in ways that it hadn’t been embraced since the earliest days of Flickr. Google seized the opportunity to showcase that this community could become more than just a web thing. Google sponsored photo walks. Googlers participated in our photo trips. Google gave us broadcasted hangouts. Lotus Carroll and I just broadcasted our 30th weekly episode of Photo Talk Plus last week where photographers can hang out on live video and in a chat room that goes with the show and interact.

The success of Google+ with the photography community was not lost on Facebook. Facebook quickly mimicked Google’s presentation and layout for photos. The old photo thumbnails at Facebook were super tiny. Postage stamped size. Facebook went from just a couple of employees looking after photos to a whole team working on photos. Photos got bigger and better looking. New full screen versions were developed. Photos are featured much more prominently in the timeline feature. Facebook has given notice that they are here to compete with Google+ in photos in a big way. Google has the lead for sure, but Facebook is a serious competitor coming on strong.

So what about Flickr? Flickr represents the largest collection of quality organized photos on the web today. Facebook has more photos, but Flickr has better photos and better organized photos with quality metadata organized around the photos.

Flickr is also probably the most loved and passionately cared about service that Yahoo currently offers. It’s one of those properties whose significance should not be weighed by a profit and loss statement. It should be understood that embracing the passion of these users and harnessing that for Yahoo is the biggest social opportunity for Yahoo at present.

Yahoo has, with Flickr, the core to launch a serious contender to both Google+ and Facebook. Flickr is not “just photos.” Within the DNA of Flickr is a highly social property with serious potential if given the right resources and attention. Flickr Groups could become a powerhouse for groups all across the web that have nothing to do with photography. Competition is fierce though and time is short. Google Events is the first step towards creating a more meaningful group experience at Google and they did Google Events really, really well. It almost feels like it was built for, yes, wait for it — photographers.

So here is where I’ll give my armchair quarterback advice on what to do with Flickr.

Option 1 — sell it to Google. Google needs it. Google is playing catch up in a big way with Facebook in the social networking space. Google sort of has to keep Picasa as it is because it’s used by a lot of people, but Picasa in its current form will never likely become a social powerhouse. Google needs something more powerful than Picasa to funnel into Google+.

Google has the commitment to social, the money, the design and engineering talent, etc. to really do something big with it. What Instagram is to Facebook as a stand alone property, Flickr could become to Google+. Google would acquire the rich archive that Flickr represents and be able to better index this library of images for image search. They could monetize this archive better than the current Flickr/Getty deal which pays photographers out a ridiculously low rate of 20% on the sale of stock photography.

Google would get many important, visible and significant Flickr streams like the Royal Family and the President Obama that they could more deeply integrate into Google+. They’d get less famous streams but equally culturally important streams by museums and governmental archives.

Yahoo and Google have been competitors in the past. You have relationships with people at Google. If your jumping ship to Yahoo isn’t seen as an act of betrayal by your Google friends, you could definitely broker this sort of a sale.

Facebook’s a potential buyer too, but Google needs it more and the users would go with Google over Facebook I think in a migration. I might be wrong but I see Facebook post-Instagram as being more interested in growing out their photo stuff organically than in buying something like Flickr.

2. Option 2 — Seriously invest in Flickr and grow it. Flickr needs a ton of work, but could have huge potential still. Why let Getty keep the bulk of stock photography sales? Renegotiate that relationship and cut out the middle man. Acquire a stock photography agency. Open up stock sales to more users and more of their photos. Stock sales at Flickr have nothing to do with the revenue that you could generate from that business and everything to do with your ability to attract the best photographers on the web today to publish their stuff through Flickr which would be a greater benefit. The money is just an easy way to get more of these types on board.

Why am I only selling 200 of my photos as stock on Getty and getting 20% payout when I could be selling all 73,000 of my photos as stock on Flickr/Yahoo and we split it 50/50? Figure out the liability issues, these can be insured against to a large degree and use this money as a magnet to funnel the best photographers in the world into Flickr.

Your current manager for Flickr Markus Spiering is a good one but he needs a lot more resources. Flickr needs to move their new justified layout to other areas of the site. They need a basic mobile app to flip through and easily fave photos. They need a thread reader for groups on the mobile. Flickr needs circles/lists/buckets to better manage our contacts. Flickr needs more robust blocking tools — when you block someone on Flickr they should be totally invisible to you everywhere on the site.

Flickr does have what some might call an amateur porn problem or an amateur porn opportunity depending on how you look at it. What this is and how it exists at Flickr should be understood from a political/revenue standpoint and figured out — or maybe not.

Flickr needs to invest more heavily in community management. Markus has started to revitalize some of this along with Zack Sheppard, who is Flickr’s community manager, but much more work is needed here. Flickr should be courting the photography community in really robust ways and leveraging community leaders as new unofficial company evangelists (like Google Photos has done so well).

Yahoo should more broadly promote their key Flickr photographers across other Yahoo properties. Image search at Yahoo should recognize Flickr’s powerful interestingness algorithm and include far more results from Flickr in both image and web search. Yahoo should figure out how to identify key Flickr community leaders and look to promote their work across other Yahoo properties.

Option 3 — keep Flickr as it is now. This is the least attractive option in my opinion. Flickr’s value will erode over time. You’ll get less for it if you sell it later as they’ll continue to lose their lead in photo social networking in the photography space. Facebook, Instagram, Google+ are all competing heavily for this business and will only continue into the future. They are allocating millions of dollars towards their social networking efforts where photos play a big role.

Without investing in Flickr to try and reclaim the title of “king of the photo networks” and in fact leveraging this into something far beyond photos in social networking, Yahoo is much better off selling it today than waiting three years down the road.

If you ever want to talk photos at Flickr/Yahoo feel free to drop me a line. I love photography on the web and can talk about ways to make Flickr better all day long if you’re interested in it.

Oh, and sign up for a Flickr account and encourage people you know to share photos on it too. It doesn’t look like you have one yet. These things may not seem like they matter, but they do. Leading by example sends a powerful message both to the troops and to the photo community more broadly speaking. By using Flickr you also hopefully can better understand the potential of what it can become in the future.