Angus Logan's Blog

The Flickr friend finder just got some coverage on ReadWriteWeb (my comment). Like anything, sharing photos is more fun with friends.

I’m a huge fan of Flickr, I think their product is really impressive (it is different to Spaces Photos given that we focus on A PERSON’S photos and sharing those with friends/family, where as flickr leans towards horizontally slicing – for example here is my home town and my favorite long exposure photos).

You can now bring the party to flickr - i.e. check if your friends from lots of other networks/address books (Microsoft Live Contacts / Google / Yahoo) are on flickr so you can find their photos etc.

Lets look at the business value here

Flickr has LOTS of users, we all know that. But I’m not sure how much of their social networking functionality (i.e. the relationships between their users) has been adopted. For me I only had my brother listed as family, no other contacts.

Using the Windows Live Contacts API (and the other contact APIs) flickr have:

1. End User affinity / making flickr feel like home : by allowing their web site visitors to connect with friends who they know outside of flickr on flickr (therefore bringing select relationships from outside of flickr to flickr)
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel : flickr are able to bootstrap/populate their social network by using the contacts which exist elsewhere instead of building out their own social graph from the ground up (which they could definitely to but it would take a little longer)

Show me the experience!

Go to the Friend finder

Select Windows Live Hotmail (you can also select Yahoo! Mail and GMail) – I’d imagine soon there will be Facebook / LinkedIn / insert social network here.

 

If you aren’t already authenticated, use your Windows Live ID to sign in (IMPORTANT: Notice how you are not sharing your Windows Live ID secret credential pair with Flickr – this is a good thing!)

You get to the consent.live.com screen, this is the common delegation framework for all of Windows Live from here you can approve/reject.

We have also implemented PER CONTACT delegation capabilities, so I can select if I do not want to send a friend’s contact details (for example Steve Ballmer doesn’t like when I give his contact details out… Though he didn’t mind giving them out in the MIX08 keynote)

 

Request to read your Live Contacts address book will default to a 1 year delegation (i.e. FlickR could read my contacts for 1 year) – I have changed this to 1 day just so they can grab the information to make the matches in their system.

Once I clicked approve, a (possibly encrypted depending on configuration) token (not my password, not my email address) is posted back Flickr which they will store with my user profile.

Flickr can now call the Live Contacts API to query all of my friends and they can find the intersection.

You will notice that my Windows Live contacts aren’t automatically added as a Flickr friend, instead I get the choice. John Richards mentioned the reason for this in post announcing a lot of social network partnerships: “To preserve the context of the relationship, we are requiring that relationships be re-established in each experience with permission from the friend or contact, rather than automatically storing the data.”

After I select the relationship level I want to have with my contacts, they now appear in Flickr.

Summary

I’m now a happier flickr user because out of my 143 contacts in Windows Live Contacts I was able to find 15 friends on flickr who I have now added as a friend.

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Here is the comment I left on Marshall’s ReadWriteWeb post in response to “Data Portability or Privacy Violation?":

From a Windows Live point of view I'm really jazzed that Flickr have implemented the Windows Live Contacts API to allow our joint-customers to have a killer web experience finding their friends.

Marshall - regarding security through obscurity and that this process now automates finding of friends... you could write a script over the top of flickr to find your friends anyway, and the scrip you would use would probably ask you for your username/password which would risk your security... overall I believe they have implemented great functionality that makes it easier for me to use MY DATA (friends) to enrich an existing website.