Flickr...my experience.

I have used Flickr in the past, I signed up under a different account back in 2008. However I later cancelled my Yahoo account. This also cancelled my access to my Flickr account, however it left my Intellectual Property up, in the form of my photos. (I am also a Photographer).  My username from yahoo was recycled and now someone else has control over my IP. I emailed Yahoo and Flickr customer support and never received any sort of response from them. So that is the background that I have with Flickr...not great.

For the purposes of this assignment I created a new Flickr account. They have changed a lot of the controls in the intervening years (the only thing constant is change) and I felt that most of the controls were not as intuitive as they were previously. Flickr now uses what we call "Mystery Meat" Navigation. (It is bad design and impedes usability.)

Despite the poor layout, I managed to upload three images that I created myself. I took a couple comics from the well known comic Dilbert and created my own. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, even encourages this type of Web 2.0 behavior, know as a Mashup.
The upload process itself was smooth, and I tagged the images with appropriate tags. Upon clicking the tags and seeing what other images were also tagged with the same tags, it seemed there was an unending list of images.

The problem with user defined tags is that they are not always very cohesive in terms of vocabulary. With the example of "Mashup" that I used; upon searching for the tag "mashup" I began to see a lot of photos of people skating. I investigated this further and there is a phenomenon where competitive roller derby skaters get together and call it a "mashup", definitely not what most of us would consider a "mashup".  This illustrates one of the problems of users defining tags, it can lead to ambiguity in definitions, which distorts the process of tagging.

For the third image, I created a Mosaic using Andreamosaic. It is a small piece of freeware that allows a user to take numerous other images and create a mosaic from them. I created the "WEB2.0" image in Photoshop and then fed approximately 110 other images into Andreamosaic that I had culled from around the web. The 110 images that I used were from various logos, concepts, trends, memes or comics that I felt best embodied the Web2.0 concept. The Andreamosaic program then spit out a mosaic from those 110 images that replicated the original "Web2.0" image that I created in Photoshop. I tagged this with the phrase "Web 2.0".

This tag represented the other problem that I ran into with Flickr and the user tagging system. SPAM! Lots of it. For common phrases, there were numerous photos posted that were nothing more than advertising that took advantage of the fact that "Web 2.0" was a popular tag. I researched this some more by going to other classmate's photostreams. One example used "Blog" as a tag. This too resulted in a flood of spam advertising playing the popularity of the word. This was repeated with several other tags as well.

I also had some other photos on my photostream, that for the purpose of the class I decided to make private so as not to flood my photostream with too much material. The process for this was very non-intuitive and involved actually needing to read a tutorial on how to change permissions on a mass of photos. The fact that I had to resort to reading a tutorial speaks volumes to the lack of ease that things are accomplished on Flickr. I am very web savvy, I can't tell you the last time I required a tutorial for anything. Not a great impression with regards to the new layout for Flickr.

They have tried really hard to embrace the whole AJAX design paradigm, I am not sure that it entirely "works" for their front page, but I can appreciate what they are striving for.


BTW, the link to my Flickr is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/58192505@N05/