Flickr Becomes More Fun With A New People You Might Know Feature

Flickr is a community for photo enthusiasts, but secretly it wants to be more like Facebook

Say you already have a pretty popular website, but you still want to attract a larger crowd than what you’re already attractive. What are you supposed to do then? Well, based on the site you already have and the services you’re offering, you try to figure out what other services people might be interested in. Right now, web users seem to have a lot of fun out of social networking, interacting with friends and sharing content. Flickr has become a huge community of photography enthusiasts, but it needs to grow a bit more. Making it more interesting is quite simple because you can easily take the time to establish what makes another (larger) site interesting, like Facebook.

The natural response to that is to make Flickr a small bit more social. That’s why the company has just added a new feature which will allow users to find their friends. It’s hard to say that it’s “similar” to Facebook’s people you may know feature, because truth be told it’s exactly the same. Regardless of the copying that took place here, it’s pleasant to be able to do that on Flickr as well. The suggestions the site gives are based on your contacts as well as the people that your contacts know.

This means it’s now easy to find everyone you know and build up new connections. As the company mentioned on its blog: “We think that Flickr is the best way to keep up with what’s going on in your world and share your photos with the people you care about”. Contacts can be added on the Find Your Friends page or on the right hand side with the help of a new module found on each users’ Flickr home page. Also from the module people can be grouped into “family”, “friend” or “contact”. Assuming you want to get even more suggestions, you can dismiss the ones that don’t seem interesting and get some brand new ones to choose from.

As always, there are some people who aren’t especially fond of change and want things back to how they used to be. If you don’t want to show up in other people’s suggestion list you can make this feature completely disappear by using the existing hide your profile from public searches setting. The changes don’t end here though. Flickr has also introduced a new option allowing users to check their contact lists on Facebook and establish which of the friends there already have an account on Flickr. Until now, they’ve had access to Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail contacts. The tough thing to determine here is whether Flickr has any point now that Facebook is achieving constant growth and allowing people to share all of their photos. A “niche” site is still needed obviously and photo enthusiasts might still prefer having an account on Flickr and Facebook at the same time. Do you have a Flickr account? How do you feel about these changes and what do you think Flickr should add to become even more popular and appealing to users?11