People don’t like being told what to do. We like to explore, change things around, and make a place our own. Hefty design challenges await the makers of websites where people feel free to engage; both with the system itself and with each other. Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can’t predict—they’ll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.
At Flickr, we’ve worked very hard to remain neutral while our members jostle and collide and talk and whisper to each other. Sharing photos is practically a side-effect. Our members have thrilled and challenged us—not just with their beautiful photography, but by showing us how to use our infrastructure in ways we could have never imagined.
It’s only in hindsight and with analysis that the strategies I share in this article have emerged.
A space for play#section2
Amy Franceschini is one of my favorite artists. In 2002, she created a sculpture called Game for the Masses, her “Intro to Game Theory.” In game play, players distribute all the “pucks” evenly. Whoever manages to collect all the pucks wins. That’s it.
The game was positioned in a gallery with a small set of rules and instructions, but the game was left open for development. Over the course of the night, the game developed into a multi-player, three-dimensional, architectural, gambling, building site for ages three and up. (Source: Futurefarmers.)
The sculpture demonstrated a fascinating idea: given fewer rules, people actually behaved in more creative, co-operative, and collaborative (or competitive, as the case may be) ways.
If you imagine Flickr as something like Game for the Masses—a playing field without rules or a “way to play”—you can see how people can learn to engage with one another through conversations about their content.
Flickr groups are the center of gameplay, from prosaic groups about specific cameras or photography techniques all the way to weird, esoteric groups such as In Numerical Order, where members must add pictures taken of numbers in the real world in—you guessed it— numerical order. There’s the gaggle of “Guess Where” groups in which members take mysterious photos of places in their town and other members identify where each shot was taken. The fabulous wardrobe_remix group’s 6,000 members photograph their outfits and describe them for the world. Interestingly, the rules of this group evolved over time to maintain the group’s own attention. The group spawned other remix groups like Blythe Doll—Wardrobe Remix and even wardrobe_remix BABY. There is seemingly no limit to our endless need to share, to be creative, and imitate other people. All these groups coalesced without any input from the Flickr team.
Although cultural differences and personal prejudices about The Way Things Should Be have challenged us at FlickrHQ, we never mediate group dynamics: our members must be left to their own devices. Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.
Steady, careful growth#section3
Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.” It simply must happen gradually. It must be cared for, and hosted; it takes time and people with great communication skills to set the tone and tend the conversation.
When Flickr was born, Caterina Fake and I spent many hours greeting new members personally. We opened up chat windows with each new visitor to say “Hi! I work here, and I’d love to help you get started, if you have any questions.” We also provided public forums where staff were present and interactive. Those decisions proved crucial, because apart from creating points where we could inject a certain culture, it was all so personal.
If you want to stir your audience on a rapidly growing community site, take advantage of what we learned—hire a community manager. Or two. You’ll need a clever communicator with a lot of experience being online to help welcome people and provide ongoing support as your community grows. Show your personality and be available. Flickr’s tone is not necessarily suitable for every community, but the point is, the tone is evident everywhere you look.
Personal voice, unobtrusive design#section4
I adore it when people tell me that Flickr makes them feel a certain way. From the outset, I worked hard to make the site seem as if there was a person behind the screen talking to you. As we churned out pages to piece the site together, I obsessed about copy all over the place to make Flickr sound human. From the labels on submit buttons—“Get in there!” to log in, to the copy that shows up if something goes wrong—“Forgotten your password? Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us,” or “An empty comment box? That won’t work!” Exclamations like Yay! Woo! Bonk! Rock! Yee har! make people feel like they’re progressing and doing things well.
We consciously chose to make the site design appear plain and simple, despite its deep complexity. A white background, blue links, sans-serif font, and largely gray palette all present the site as a straightforward place. The look of the place must never overwhelm the photos themselves. We also tried to create an egalitarian playing field. At a glance, visitors can’t differentiate a professional photographer with an enormous lens from an enthusiast just getting started in photography. There is no indication of “quality” apart from the content itself. That also means that it’s up to the viewer to decide for themselves which photos they like to look at and explore without prejudice.
Help people explore#section5
It’s easy to get lost on Flickr. You click from here to there, this to that, then suddenly you look up and notice you’ve lost hours. Allow visitors to cut their own path through the place and they’ll curate their own experiences. The idea that every Flickr visitor has an entirely different view of its content is both unsettling, because you can’t control it, and liberating, because you’ve given control away. Embrace the idea that the site map might look more like a spider web than a hierarchy. There are natural links in content created by many, many different people. Everyone who uses a site like Flickr has an entirely different picture of it, so the question becomes, what can you do to suggest the next step in the display you design?
Anonymity vs identity#section6
Identity is a crucial part of social software systems, but it can (and should) take time for an identity to reveal itself. Certainly, you can be invited to join an existing community by a friend—and that’s something we specifically designed for—but, even then, when you start to reach out from your “safety blanket,” your own identity comes to the fore. What do you do when you first hear of a new site to visit? I don’t know about you, but generally I’ll head on over and perhaps even sign up. As I poke around, I’m essentially anonymous. I have no ties to anyone or anything, and am free to move about without any recognition. This anonymity is important. It allows a new visitor to look around and get a feel for the place, and choose when and how to get started.
Over time on Flickr, members who continue to appear anonymous (only favoriting other people’s photos while posting none of their own, or using the site without adding contacts) are often treated with some suspicion by other members. Identity and connections appear to have social value.
There’s a fine line between a rule and a guideline#section7
There came a point, in about May of 2005, when we realized that we needed guidelines that could help to do the work that we were able to do on a 1:1 basis in the early days. Flickr was simply too big to maintain the “high touch” strategy that served us in the beginning. With scale comes the opportunity for more misunderstandings, collisions, and disagreements.
We needed a way to represent the culture of the place. So, as I sat on a train for several mornings with Heather Champ, Flickr’s very own community manager, we tossed back and forth The Thirteen-Or-So Commandments. Of course, they weren’t actually commandments, but rather guidelines that we wanted all our new members to at least skim. My personal favorite—”Don’t Be Creepy: You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”—is something a lawyer would never write, and yet it speaks volumes. The other important point is that the “commandments” were designed to be open to interpretation, not to be conclusive. Writing guidelines like this is a great exercise for any team—it encourages reflection about the sort of culture you’re trying to foster.
Variation#section8
This is the real nugget of successful online communities. It’s the sheer breadth of places like Flickr that keep people coming back, and keep people participating. There’s no way to design all things for all people. When you’re dealing with The Masses, it’s best to try to facilitate behavior, rather than to predict it. Design, in this context, becomes more about showing what’s possible than showing what’s there. Imagine your site as a “Game for the Masses” where you don’t make the rules. Leave your members to negotiate and communicate and you’ll get a much richer result.
Be open#section9
Participate in the community you’re trying to build. Add content, make contact, show yourself as a person and have fun. It took me a while to get used to, but now I love and appreciate that when I meet someone who uses Flickr for the first time, they might mention a part of my life that they’ve seen in a photo. I’m part of the team who built the place, but I’m also addicted to Flickr itself.
Community?#section10
As the Flickr community continues to expand, it seems to operate more like a society. Communities on Flickr are just like the communities we belong to offline. They’re small groups of people who know each other or share a specific interest, and whose members want to participate, not only as contributors but also as consumers. As my own distance from each member increases, and influence over their path into the system is basically removed, I see Flickr itself becoming simply an infrastructure to the communities we support. They look after themselves, as well as their induction of new members. Flickr becomes about uptime, speed, and flexibility—almost detaching the things we build from the content itself and people’s interaction with it.
I want to say something cheesy about teaching people to fish, but will refrain. Treat your place like your home: welcome people, fix them a drink and make them feel comfortable. Before you know it, your guests will be chatting amongst themselves, the party will be pumping, and people will be making plans together.
I wonder if, in the described Flickr groups, you observe a small group of people who contribute a lot of comments and photos and a large group who contribute a lot less. Like described by Jacob Nielsen in “Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities”:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
“People don’t like being told what to do. We like to explore, change things around, and make a place our own. ” Isn’t that the essence of this whole ‘internet’ thing?!?
This web of ours is becoming a place where all the rules can be rewritten to suit our individual and 21st Century needs. Community architecture is, I agree, about nurturing and empowering the individual to be as creative and connected as possible.
You state that as Flickr continues to grow, “it seems to operate more like a society.” I think the analogy can even be expanded further, Flickr as an institution on the internet, even the beginnings of a visual processing (occipital) ‘lobe’ of the internet. Each portion of the ‘society’ acts to contribute, aggregate, processe, etc. the inputs from the edge of the network and therefore adds their own value to it. Over time rolls form, personalities emerge and ‘governing bodies’ need to suggest guidlines/rules that will help these complex networked individuals to conduct their ‘business’ in these networks.
As a governing body (i.e. the host of the site and the people who decided what users are and aren’t able to do from a technical and thus social level), I agree, it is “very hard to remain neutral while our members jostle and collide and talk and whisper to each other” and I commend Flickr and so many others in this frontier for doing so.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see a window into the Internet 10 years down the road? What are the possibilities if a community is nurtured just right. What ‘guidlines’ will need to be in place to support sustainable social architecture? How will these communities evolve over the coming years?
ahh well, too many good questions and things to think about. Thanks for getting me started!
A well written and insightful piece. Thanks you for your thoughtful perspective.
I’m impressed by how useful these takeaways are for understanding what makes for effective communities in the _offline_ world. Brilliant.
I spend too much time on Flickr.
But as part of my work involves photography it’s not too surprising!
One thing not mentioned in the article is blogs – and more specifically the Flickr widget.
My main Flickr group is http://www.flickr.com/groups/cyclingedinburgh
This ‘supplies’ pictures to http://cyclingedinburgh.info (strip in right hand column).
It currently has 92 members (I only know who half a dozen are ‘in real life’ even though most of them live in the same city!)
Maybe I should organise a meet!
People add photos to do with cycling in Edinburgh – not always pictures with bikes IN.
This is a random process – though I also seek out contributions by simply searching http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=edinburgh&s=rec
The resulting vertical strip of 10 images changes several times most days and can produce some really interesting juxtapositions. (Which are occasionally worth grabbing to form another image! – http://www.flickr.com/photos/chdot/2338879304/ )
Then people comment on the photos (in Flickr)
It really is a web of connections.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chdot
I adore your comments about anonymity vs identity. I think anonymous participation is something that isn’t explicitly discussed enough – we’re forever rattling on about managing online identity, premised on the idea that most people are happy to have their online activity centred around a publically projected identity, and this doesn’t seem to be the case among the wider group of Web users, ones who aren’t bloggers, opinionators, and other types of Web mouths. As you suggest, anonymity doesn’t have to condemn a user to passive consumption.
You made a comment that users who choose to remain anonymous tend to be treated, eventually, with suspicion by other members, and leave us with the rather elliptical suggestion that “identity and connections appear to have social value”. That doesn’t explain any actual _suspicion_, though, and I’d be very interested in your take on where this suspicion comes from, and the rights and wrongs of not coagulating your online identity in online fora such as Flickr.
great article. good things to think about as i work on a new project. my biggest struggle is accepting the dark underbelly of the society in microcosm – there is a creepster component on flickr. there are ways to deal with it, but it’s there. the flickr community is large enough that you can stay in the “good neighborhoods” .. but in a smaller, growing community, how do we make sure trolls don’t set up shop and dominate the conversation?
hmm how do I add this user as a contact? where is that link again!? dang flicker interface..
I like to read such great posts about creativity and mutual esteem! Thanks!
Interesting that you mention gaming as I believe Flickr was originally designed to be a game! (“Game Neverending” I think it was called.)
The design is great – love the pink and blue colours, which have translated into real life events. But the white background does not show photos at their best. You’ve probably all seen those links under some photos: “Best viewed on black”. Sites like Blackr (?) and some blogs exist to showcase photos directly from Flickr on black backgrounds. I checked one blog and the photos made my jaw drop. Amazing deep colours. Yet I’d already seen the same photos on Flickr with a white background and not been so amazed. The difference was stunning. Black simply makes the colours richer. The problem is that text isn’t as nice on a black background.
I then wrote a few lines of CSS and made a custom stylesheet that could be applied to Flickr automatically by the browser. The styles set a permanent black background and I thought it worked really well. See an “example screenshot along with the code”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherhester/2104263736/in/set-72157602729084151/ .
Video! I’m surprised the article didn’t mention this. It’s interesting how negative the reaction has been to its introduction on Flickr. So much for the community spirit of love. This could be a good example of how a community fights change introduced by its creators. What will happen when the next big feature is introduced? Or would some users prefer Flickr to stay fixed as it is now, forever? I hope not. I personally enjoy videos on Flickr and can easily avoid them if I didn’t. It’s great to finally upload some of my digital camera shorts that I’ve made over the years, without going to another site like YouTube. The 90-second time limit is genius. (Though I hope it gets extended over time.) We are also seeing some superb talents emerge who are complimenting their photostreams with videos.
Fantastic post – I run a site thats in its formative stages. I barely even own a camera but love browsing flickr. The more I hear about how you guys built such a great site the more I realize what we need to do to make our site as engaging.
Thank you
Philip
Snooth.com
Wow – Thank you for all your thoughtful comments. It’s lovely to hear that you enjoyed the article! I wanted to address a couple of things directly…
*Richard said*
_”I wonder if, in the described Flickr groups, you observe a small group of people who contribute a lot of comments and photos and a large group who contribute a lot less.”_
Yes, I’m sure that’s often the case, particularly when people are finding their feet within a new group of people. It depends a bit on the sort of group too, I think. I’ve observed a certain cycle on Flickr several times which I think is fascinating. An example is where someone might post to our Help Forum asking a question (or being angry about something!), and then I’ll see that same person actually being helpful in some of the other threads! I think what often happens in groups is that some members will participate and engage more deeply than others, and often end up being “promoted” to a moderator or an admin.
Nielsen’s theory about lurking really just mirrors the way we are offline, doesn’t it? Not everyone’s an extrovert or an exhibitionist.
*Charles said*
_”Isn’t that the essence of this whole “˜internet’ thing?!?”_
Absolutely! We the People of the Internet have always known that, but I think it’s a relatively new realisation for the megacorps and broadcasters out there 🙂
_”I think the analogy can even be expanded further, Flickr as an institution on the internet, even the beginnings of a visual processing (occipital) “˜lobe’ of the internet. Each portion of the “˜society’ acts to contribute, aggregate, processe, etc. the inputs from the edge of the network and therefore adds their own value to it.”_
What a wonderful thing to say!! I think I love you!
*Chris said*
_”Maybe I should organise a meet!”_
I’d highly recommend that. Flickr meets are great! There are lots happening all over the world, a sample of which you can see over in “the Flickr group on Upcoming”:http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/8/.
*Douglas said*
_”…and leave us with the rather elliptical suggestion that “identity and connections appear to have social value”?. That doesn’t explain any actual suspicion, though, and I’d be very interested in your take on where this suspicion comes from.”_
(This could probably fill a whole other article.)
Apologies for the ellipsis – I thought it was particularly hard to quantify that concept, so made a slightly cheeky assertion rather than stating a hard fact.
One of the most powerful things about Flickr, I think, is that it allows us to see true lives and actual people. Certainly there is a huge artistic vein to the content, but there are also many, many life stories and often gritty realities. Perhaps it’s as if there’s a “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” thing going on. Perhaps it’s that people who don’t engage and share after a while aren’t “joining in.”
*Lori said*
_”in a smaller, growing community, how do we make sure trolls don’t set up shop and dominate the conversation?”_
You need to concentrate and be present. If someone comes by and makes waves, you’re well within your rights to weed them out. It’s like that annoying dude at your party who’s hitting on all the chicks and generally being a dork. No harm in asking him to leave…
*Richard A. said*
_”hmm how do I add this user as a contact? where is that link again!? dang flicker interface..”_
Wily, isn’t it? (You can add someone as a contact a few different ways: by mousing over their buddy icon, clicking on the little arrow that pops up and choosing “Add as a contact”, or by heading for their profile and clicking “Add x as a contact.” Totally acknowledge this could be easier, fwiw.)
*Chris H. said*
_”I then wrote a few lines of CSS and made a custom stylesheet that could be applied to Flickr automatically by the browser.”_
Fantastic! I must mention my very favourite Greasemonkey hack… An Englishman named Pip wrote a little script to “change the spelling”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pip/59343912/ of “favorite” to the Queen’s English spelling, “favourite” 🙂
There are “loads of hacks like this”:http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=1&w=all&q=greasemonkey+screenshot+flickr&m=text… though maybe “hacks” is the wrong word. Perhaps “enhancements” is better.
_”It’s interesting how negative the reaction has been to [video] on Flickr. So much for the community spirit of love. This could be a good example of how a community fights change introduced by its creators.”_
Yes, agreed. You could say that the negativity is also a sign of love, that people feel such passion for the place and feel protective of it. Interestingly, there was also a “backlash against the backlash” over video on Flickr, where other members helped to assuage fears, poke fun or stay the course with video. We knew it was a big change – absolutely – but we also knew that it was going to be a lot of fun, opening up new channels for creativity and documentation – a position we felt confident we could defend. And you’re right, there’s some wonderful stuff coming online, which you can get a taste of over in “the Video! Video! Video! Flickr group”:http://flickr.com/groups/video/pool/ …
Yay!
Damn ascii – Sorry – I’ll try to clean that up :/
I come from a different background and experience in terms of exposure to people and their expectations. Consider yourself blessed with a pleasing creative experience. You have enjoyed a self-selecting creative audience.
My work has been in Department of Defense and Financial services areas. Here you meet a completely different kind of user. This user is frustrated if there is not ONE CLEAR WAY to locate what they want or effect a certain action. They have a checklist mentality, and their expectations are formed by previous experience, even when that experience is not necessarily related to your application paradigm. It can be a real challenge to make a web page look like the financials page of the WSJ. And you may have to do this even when you know that usability will suffer.
I have encountered people who are not just frustrated but actually offended by design decisions which have been tested against a significant group of users.
This does not mean that they will not adapt. However the pace of change and choices made must be carefully thought out so as not to alienate these users. Things that are easily apparent to the creative user who is engaged and willing to invest a little time in an adventure — may well lead this user to judge your work as “Crap”.
As “flickr becomes about uptime, speed, and flexibility—almost detaching the things we build from the content itself and people’s interaction with it.” In terms of community, would it seem that services like our site (http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/compfight-powerful-s.html), born out of a niche that flickr may not fill, represent the new direction for the flickr community? This is obviously not flickr’s core, but hey, you guys nailed it, nobody else in this market space has come close… What do you do now?
Your providing efficient tools for extending the core of flickr through the API. How do you see flickr interacting with the extended communities and fostering your own growth from now, on? Do you attempt to shape these extended communities with the same goals that you mentioned aided in flickrs initial growth? Do you simply add more media types, there by extending through the use of existing infrastructure? i.e. videos
This article makes me thankful that there are still people in the world who design with hospitality in mind. It gets at the heart of what people yearn for on the web, a place that makes them feel comfortable and treats them as a person while providing them the simple, elegant tools to do what they need and interact. There’s simple rules to being a great host, on and offline, and those who master those rules have the best parties. Great job.
Flickr’s a fantastic tool, we use it for our personal photos and even as a way of sharing photos with 3rd party design agencies. With the privacy controls we can choose who will view our images and for £24 we get two years of unlimited storage and bandwidth; much more economical then hosting it ourselves.
It’s a great community (much more fun then Facebook) has a fantastic feature set and offers more and more every time I visit.
It has also provided another portal to find Creative Commons licence imagery.
So form a commercial front and personal front flickr is a community to love; its a great design and coding of the quality you’d expect more from our friends at Google.
Anyhoo that’s starting to sound like an advert.
Raise your glasses to the site that continues to engage its community and gives without asking.
I have been a member of Flickr for a couple of years but haven’t discovered the functions much, yet. I have been trying similar websites but Flickr is the one I keep coming back to upload my photos. People say personal websites will disappear because we have inexpensive websites like Flickr to show off the content.
“”¦I worked hard to make the site seem as if there was a person behind the screen talking to you. As we churned out pages to piece the site together, I obsessed about copy all over the place to make Flickr sound human.”?
I think this is what we have been trying to do especially since E-commerce websites became popular. The information and products suppliers are trying to provide services which they need to add value to differentiate them from their competitors. The higher point of services for example, is where users can shop things as if he is at an actual shop getting advised or informed face-to-face.
It is possible 10 years from now, we may use or discover the “computer”? in a totally different way and we deal with a person behind a webcam or projected hologram. The way of providing online services may totally change. Flickr’s friendly words are one of these steps for future. I had been involved with a sharing-content —website before. The actual copy on the site, as well as having a black or while background, were some of the larger issues we had to address.
,—-
| Amy Franceschini is one of my favorite artists. In 2002, she created a
| sculpture called Game for the Masses, her “Intro to Game Theory.”? In
| game play, players distribute all the “pucks”? evenly. Whoever
| manages to collect all the pucks wins. That’s it.
`—-
You make it sound like poker
*Thomas said* _”My work has been in Department of Defense and Financial services areas. Here you meet a completely different kind of user. This user is frustrated if there is not ONE CLEAR WAY to locate what they want or effect a certain action.”_
Certainly. The trick with large, information-heavy sites designed from within the organization is that you often end up with impenetrable systems that only a mother could love. I tried to pay a parking ticket on the Californian Department of Motor Vehicles site the other day, and it took me a while to work out where to do it, when I would have thought this is a) a pretty common task, and b) a money earner!
Even though Flickr sets a certain tone, and is a fairly free-flowing place, we’ve also tried very hard to make the “micro-interactions”, like changing an email address or adding a tag very direct and clear. This sort of effort can happen in any system, whether it’s a fun place to be, or not.
_”I have encountered people who are not just frustrated but actually offended by design decisions which have been tested against a significant group of users.”_
Funnily enough, that actually happens on Flickr too, every time we release a new feature! It’s probably change more than anything else that people react to. Who knows? If there was focus on interaction design on every site, perhaps there would be less frustration? 😉
*Ryan said* _”How do you see flickr interacting with the extended communities and fostering your own growth from now, on?”_
Good question! Hard to answer though, if you consider Flickr to be more of a vessel than anything else. I mean, Flickr itself doesn’t really interact with anything. Certainly, the “web” around Flickr will grow and expand, as content squirts all over the place, but I guess whether Flickr has influence over directing that growth is the interesting bit. I’d say Flickr is practically agnostic in that regard. We have guidelines about how to make use of the API, and guidelines about how to participate on Flickr itself. Apart from that, it’s really up to you how and when you share content from Flickr in other places.
_”Do you attempt to shape these extended communities with the same goals that you mentioned aided in flickr’s initial growth?”_
Not really, no. We try to allow people to share as they see fit. That’s possibly helped the proliferation and growth of the “Flickrverse” outside the edges of flickr.com.
When you decide you’re going to open the gates and let the data you host out on to the web, you have to make sure that a) you and your team are prepared, and b) that you respect your members’ right to opt out if they’re not into it.
*Paul* Thank you! Try throwing a “bacon camp” party! (With actual bacon!)
*Chris* Cheers!
*Cara said* _”People say personal websites will disappear because we have inexpensive websites like Flickr to show off the content.”_
Interesting, isn’t it? That idea of “My Portal”, or mashups might just mean that personal sites are a simple page that links to all the different web services I’ve cherry-picked, that suit me. I’m curious about the teeny web services like FireEagle, that only do one or two things, and very simply. Also curious about the idea that I, a non-programmer, might be able to tie different web services together without needing to write code (or maybe just a little bit, but no server administration please!). That’s exciting!
Also interesting to think about that in the context of Ryan’s comment about influencing extended communities. I’d say you’re better off releasing that influence as much as you can, just because there are almost infinite mashing possibilities. Certainly, you’ll have no control over what things look like, so you may as well just give that up right now 🙂
*Lee said* _”You make it sound like poker.”_
Heh. Don’t tell anyone.
An interesting peek into Flickr’s history can be found by reading an “interview”:http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000519.php with Eric Costello in 2005. He mentions Game Neverending, but also something called _Flickr Live_ which I hadn’t heard about before. What is it? Read the interview to find out! Fascinating stuff!
Community can make things bigger. We discuss various thing with others like blog, forums and when people join your discussion that makes the matter important and popular and more and more people start joining your discussion and that makes good healthy community.
Flickr has been a wonderful home for our community of “Blind Photographers (Blind Photographers on Flickr) “:http://www.flickr.com/groups/blind_photographers/. I created the group a few years ago wondering if I were the only visually impaired person using a camera. Now we have a group of 115 members, half of which are active. Not only to we share photography, but discuss vision issues and camera accessibility tips. We are currently doing a project to discuss how visual impairment affects our photography.
I do not think another site would have brought us all together. The main social sites like Facebook and Myspace are not friendly to this type of group. Dedicated sites just get lost in the vastness of cyber space.
Thanks to all you folks at flickr for doing what you have done.
PS If you would like advice on making flickr more accessible to the blind and visually impaired, all of us in “Blind Photographers (Blind Photographers on Flickr) “:http://www.flickr.com/groups/blind_photographers/ would love to help
I