Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I got myself a free Flickr account. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll point out that while they’re a Yahoo! company, I have not been paid or asked to endorse them, I do it of my own free will. The fact I signed up the same day I was given a new monitor and keyboard for my workstation is totally coincidental.

Flickr’s a bit like myspace meets imageshack. There’s quite a cool feature that I’m eager to test that lets you post to your blog from within it, and I was most pleased to see it came with the ability to access wordpress. The interface has both good and bad points. When logged in, you basically only have to click on the thing you want to edit, and you can change it there and then. It’s the way such an interface should be done. Unfortunately, there are a lot of areas inside your own account that leaves a real mess of menus hanging around down the bottom and some confusion in the way links with different names take you to the same place, and the like. I’ve used less confusing backends, that’s for sure. The upload tool is good, but it doesn’t let you edit tags and things for individual pictures before upload, only do a group tag. It’s fair enough, I suppose, but I expected to be able to selectively tag and upload once I’d chosen which pictures I did want to put up, not to have to group the pictures into tags before putting them into the app.

The tags, though, are what I’m really impressed by. Excuse me while I do some CompSci geeking out. It’s not the nature of essentially adding keywords to a picture that’s especially good, it’s the way they’re displayed (I’m sure Relly won’t mind me linking to her tags page, because it demonstrates better than mine how things work) For anyone who might care, this is how you make an interface. It’s functional, it looks good, and it gives you the information you need at a glance. The more times a tag is used, the larger that tag is displayed. I’m sure it’s not a new concept, but it’s the first time I’ve seen something so obviously geared towards the future of interfaces, where things are functional AND aesthetically pleasing, with neither comprimising. I love it when I find that sort of thing exists, let alone see it being used.

Flickr does, unfortunately, have a touch of the fake corporate friendliness which I despise. It’s the same thing that’s tricked people into thinking Apple are some benevolant multinational where microsoft are evil incarnate. The same thing that makes Google “Cool.” Copy like: “Hi urthworm, Yay! pootle has marked you as a contact too. Here’s a link to pootle’s profile and photos. See ya!” I’m deeply cynical about it, and anyone who buys into it. These people are not your friends, and they wouldn’t hesistate to fuck you over if it made business sense. They’re the seller, you’re the buyer, and I wish they wouldn’t try and trick people into thinking those lines can blur at all.

Finally, I do have some photos of my friends which are viewable by the public on my flickr account. I don’t really care about such things, but I understand that some people are sensitive to having their image on the internet, and it if anyone doesn’t want any photos including them to be available on my account, let me know and I’ll remove it with speed.