3 posts tagged “ffffound”

The subject of attribution on the "image bookmarking" site ffffound has been getting a bit more attention recently. For example, it's a key point in Alexander Bohm's reconsideration of the site. With the site's slow but relentless increase in popularity, I've come to notice duplicate images on the front page more and more often. (One that particularly bugs me is this early sketch of the Underground roundel, which I posted from the IHT, but which was later posted without the annoying black border via fontblog.de.)

Personally, right back to the early days of blogging (a whole five years ago now), I've tried to remember to chase back attribution as far as I can, and I do this with images on ffffound, too. Today I saw this house on the front page (linked, annoyingly, to the blog's home page, rather than the post's permalink- the sort of thing that makes it impossible to trace attribution once the page's cycled, which can be as quickly as a few days, but never mind that now), and so I read down the page looking for other posts* of interest.

Rapidly I found this Moleskinerie hack, which, unusually for such things, I quite liked. I followed the attribution change back through designboom (again, having to find the permanent link myself - are all designers incapable of doing this?) to the original artist's site (once more a link to the top level, which is more excusable this time, since the post was about his entire body of work). At each step I posted the same item to ffffound, generating three links, each addded by different people. It turns out that the least popular (two links, at the time of writing) was the artist's site; the two blogs had three links each.

ffffound doesn't really try to tie these images together, or to do anything to limit the duplication. Admittedly, sites like del.icio.us don't either, and variant URLs on the same site can lead to as much duplication as the quoting (and reuploading) of images can. Nevertheless, it's a source of annoyance to me, and, I assume, even more vexing to those whose work is never recognised, because it's referred to but never seen in the context they'd prefer, or attached meaningfully to its creator.

* I've got a rant brewing about the use of "blog" to mean "blog post" as opposed to "site", but never mind that now either. Anyway, I fear that the battle's already lost, despite me only noticing the trend a month or three ago.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found myself still using ffffound quite heavily over the past couple of months. There seems to be something relaxing about bouncing down the page scanning the nice design and pretty pictures.

However, early on, I (and others (look at Michal Migurski’s comment)) noted that as well as all the posters held up by headless designers, photos from the 1960s and bits of Helvetica, there were a fair few pictures of people, primarily women, occasionally not wearing very much. Personally I just bounced past most of them, and on the odd occasion they cropped up in my recommendations and were particularly irksome, marked them as inappropriate. Somewhat to my surprise, the last few months haven't really seen a big change in the ratio of such images to the more design-led ones, which is a good thing; the tight rein on invites probably has a lot to do with it.

Today, however, the front page turned up this image, which reads

helloworld. I am using ffffounddotcom. I am a graphic designer. therefore I love design. I would like to tell you something.
the pussy, the boobs, the whatever of your girlfriend has nothing to do with design.
design ≠ sex. pictures: yes. your sister anatomy: no thanks.

Of course, if there are gynaecological pictures, I don't want to see them either. As I said, though, they're pretty rare and tend not to escape onto the front page, and if they do, users have a "not appropriate" button, which seems to work (albeit slowly; I think there's a human in the loop somewhere.)

Anyway, this is what ffffound itself says it's about:

FFFFOUND! is a web service [which allows people] to post and share their favorite images found on the web

I note this doesn't say anything about "design", only about inspirational images. Looking at the history of art, one can hardly deny that beautiful women have often been muses. In fact, I'm surprised quite how dry and literary ffffound is, considering it's dominated by the image at the expense of text. Nonetheless, there are a lot of people's collections (mine included) that are dominated by monochrome images and a surfeit of typography. Perhaps thousands of years of cultural indoctrination that the word is better than the image is hard to shake off, especially for a programmer who dabbles in design. From that point of view, the surprise isn't that there's porn - or stuff approaching it - on the site, but that there's not more of it.

Anyway, I think the point is that, from an initial sniffiness about the images of people on the site, I've come to realise that there's more to life than black, white, red, and Helvetica, even if I don't add it to my stream.

(There's another category of image that you see rarely on ffffound, although it is getting slightly more common; the Fark / Worth 1000 / somethingawful / b3ta joke. I can only recall seeing one or two in the last few hundred images that have graced the front page, and I think that, in the long run, I'm more worried they'll take over than that the artsy nudes will.)

For the last week or so, I've been using a site called ffffound a great deal. In its own words,

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

There's a great writeup by Michal Migurski which, if you've not seen it, you should read. He covers the bookmarklet, the lack of tags. It's interesting that its tight invite policy - although it's gone up from one to three per user - has kept the site's quality high, despite the growth of the site. (A mention from Kottke and wide linking to an animated gif of Paris Hilton don't seem to have caused problems.)

There are a couple of things mentioned in that post I'd like to reiterate. Firstly, the automatic creation of the fan/follower network (based on who posted images first, I believe) is lovely. Compared to its two obvious reference points, Flickr and del.icio.us, this really feels like magic, and it seems to largely work. (Migurski himself noted that your network is no longer invisible, but it is still autogenerated.) Secondly, the site has a really nice string of image connections; it's very easy to surf. I still run a narrow browser, so I almost missed the three thumbnails to the right of every main image; beyond that, when you click through to an image's page, there's usually a good half dozen candidates for further exploration.

A feature that wasn't mentioned (maybe it came along later?) is the use of vi keys for paging. Usually the standard paging in a browser works fine, but for a screen of images, you'll usually end up with an image stranded half in the viewport, half out. ffffound allows you to use 'j' to bounce between anchor tags for each image, fixing it toward the top of the page and allowing you to see it in full. There are also keys to scroll upwards, and to go back and forth between pages. It's really easy to scan. Another nice touch - this one only noticable once you've joined - is the distinction between "posted" and "found" images. The former are those you've added with the bookmarklet, whereas the latter include those you saw on the site. Both have RSS feeds, too, which is nice.

There are very few issues I have with the site. I suppose an API would be nice, but to be honest for what I want to do - possibly include my found images on my site - the RSS is perfectly sufficient. However, I do worry that a single big list of found images will make it hard for me to get images I like back out of ffffound when I want them. An API would fix this, if it exposed the date and title metadata already on the image. I've also had trouble with the bookmarklet on Safari 3 on Windows, but that browser is so crashy I'm reluctant to blame ffffound for it.

Browsing, and then using, ffffound also prompted me to think about Flickr's favourites. Unsurprisingly, a lot of images are from Flickr, but there's no real integration at either end. Personally, I'm making a bit of a distinction; if it's on Flickr and obviously a photo (as opposed to artwork), I'm still adding it as a favourite there; otherwise, it'll be on ffffound. Most other ffffound users don't seem as picky, though. I wonder what the "API users are stealing my images" crowd will do when they find out?

Anyway, I'm very happy to be on ffffound, which has some great touches, and hope that some of its lessons can be taken over to Flickr.