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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice to see big companies implementing things like this, it's great. I wonder if they took a look at the code I wrote a little while ago :)
I agree that taking advantage of the API should allow them to increase engagement on their site since right now for as much hype and as many users as they have, they pale in actual usage (minutes, PV) in comparison to other photo sites like Photobucket and Facebook Photos. Looks interesting.
I think this whole approach will lead to many, many, many hacked Windows Live ID accounts. If you guys seriously believe that average users will be able to follow the rule "only type in your credentials on login.live.com" your are just naive. AND your own uber-security guy Kim Cameron is telling that very story to the world for years already. I wouldn't mind so much if a Live ID was a low-value asset, but you bring people to associate some of their most valuable assets with it (email, calendar, contacts). I find the whole approach irresponsible. I just hope that at some point, if someone looses his credentials this way, he will sue you and present Kim Cameron's blog as evidence that you were perfectly aware in what danger you bring your users. And to make a long story short, I think the Live ID team should fix the phising problem first (i.e. implement managed infocards), before they come up with new delegation stuff etc that will just lead to more attack surface. Very bad planning.
Alex - perhaps they did - your PHP implementation of my test harness is way cool.
Hi davidacoder - Thanks for your comment!
Neel from the Windows Live ID team has posted re. Live ID & Phishing.
Check it out here : http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2008/04/08/post-by-live-id-gm-re-phishing-responding-to-davidacoder-s-comment-on-my-blog.aspx
-Angus
Wow, thanks for generating all that attention to this! I'll have a read and reply on the other post you have!
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 give
Hi Angus,
I have gone through your code for Importing windows live contacts.
I want to know how to retrieve large bulks of contacts from hotmail. If I have some 5000 contacts, it will be slow, so if I need to retrieve only some 200 contacts at a time is that possible using window live contact api.
Please do let me know if you have any idea about this.
thanks
abishek
Great post, really helped me understand, thanks!
Really great information, has given me an idea for a blog of my friends.
The think is this just doesn't really do it for me, prefer something a little less... mainstream.
I really like the idea of combining several social networks into one. Hoping for another thing like this in the future.
I really like the idea of combining several concepts into one. Hoping for more like this in the future.
Great news, thanks for the post!
This is the best thing for flickr.