Flickr as a social network

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 24

When I visited Yahoo last week researching “friendship,” they sat me down with Kakul Srivastava, the general manager of Flickr. At first I wondered why.

When she started talking, I realized how blind I’d been. Flickr, with 36 million members and a staggering 3.5 billion photos, is an immense social network. It’s full of friendship data. People comment, join groups, declare friends, click on favorite photos, and limit viewing to certain friends and family.

Flickr analyzes some of this data to figure out what they call “interestingness.” It’s an algorithm that weighs a host of variables, including friendships, to determine which photos to promote on the site. “We look at how many people have viewed a photo, how many comments there are, the relationship of the commenter to the person who took the photo,” Srivastava says.

The idea here is not advertising, but instead to use the social info to “bubble up” content most likely to please. (I’d post some of these photos, but I’m not clear on the copyright status, since this is a for-profit site.)

There’s also some potential commercial value in Flickr friendship data. Chief Research Prahbakar Raghavan told me that people who have declared themselves “friends” on Flickr tend to have similar makes of camera. He doesn’t know why this is. But at some point, such correlations could prove valuable.

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