By David Steele Overholt (March 22, 2009) (MIPs)

I’d like to take a look at being a pro member of Flickr. I’m kind of a photo-nut at times (comes and goes), but when I get in to it I really get in to it. I have over 8,000 pictures uploaded on flickr alone and tens of thousands more on my local hard drives. Flickr offers many of the same options for deployment, befriending, groups, and .

Here are my observations:

1. Persuasive Experience:
The initiative of Flickr as a whole is to engage users in uploading as many images as they can take, and to take as many pictures as they can.

2. Automated Structure:
Flickr is certainly an automated system. Adding contacts automatically sends a message to the user to ask them to do the same. Even the front of the user “home page” has an automated greeting given in multiple languages, continuing with their playful/easy-going atmosphere.

3. Social Distribution:
The ability to befriend other contacts and mark them as friends or relatives continues to grow the community. The groups, commenting and tagging systems also help this.

4. Rapid Cycle:
I’m not sure about this one – Flickr is a bit more of a latent network than Facebook, but I’m assuming has spikes as users dump pictures and then move on while others are constantly in discussion and uploading/commenting.

5. Huge Social Graph:
Yup, millions of users.

6. Measured Impact:
Flickr has its own metric systems to view your most viewed/interesting/favorited and commented on images.