3 posts tagged “social software”

A week or so ago, the lovely people at Flickr launched their new iPhone-specific mobile site. It's very nicely done, and there's one thing in particular I noticed that I've always wished for on their main site.

When viewing photos by your contacts, the "next" and "last" photo links don't go within the photostream (as they do on the main site), but they page between contacts instead. It's a really nice way to quickly look through new images.*

Having had a (years-old) desire for this feature on the website rekindled, I decided to spend a few hours with Greasemonkey seeing if I could make it happen, and I managed to do so, thanks largely to people who've led the way. Here's show_flickr_contact_context.user.js.



However, before you go charging in to install it, I should probably warn you that it's very much still at the "proof of concept" stage. Flickr's context boxes are surprisingly complicated little blocks of HTML, and (perhaps ironically) I haven't made any of the JavaScript in them work. Moreover, it seems that I've broken the functionality in existing context blocks. Moreover, the script only works when you've come directly from the Photos from your Contacts page, or if it detects an argument that it sets in the URL from the context paging block.** This is because the API call the script needs to make seems to be quite a complicated one, so I'm trying very hard to be polite with the usage of it.

Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to document even though it's really only getting going, so feel free to have a play with it. If I do tidy up any of its rough edges, I'll be sure to mention it here.

* A couple of minor notes on the implementation. On the plus side, it obeys the setting on the Photos from your Contacts page that sets whether or not you see five or one image from each. However, there's no way to modify this on the phone itself. Unfortunately, it's also hard to change contexts; in other words, to swap from paging by contacts to paging within a user's photostream. Both compromises are down to the lack of space for UI on the iPhone, though, so I'm hardly going to really complain (hence the hiding this in a footnote).
** Ideally I'd do this using Flickr's own convention: /photos/name/id/in/contacts/. Unfortunately, if Flickr finds a /in/ argument it doesn't understand, you get redirected and lose the context, so I'm using /photos/name/id/?contact=in instead. Ah well.

Until now, online communication has lacked personality, being limited to text (IM, SMS, email). Seesmic changes that, bringing conversation alive through video

"At last, the Internet is really social: you can see and hear people express their ideas and thoughts, you can join in, and you can make new friends. With Seesmic, everyone can participate in live conversations rich with personality, bought to life through video," commented Ron Conway

Although I now realise I first saw Twitter a week ago (when the news that Dunstan Orchard had moved from Apple to Flickr broke), I only really properly noticed it when I got back from a largely blissful weekend away from computers. My first reaction was pretty much nailed by Phil Gyford in the introduction to the first of two insightful posts on the back of the service:

If you hate blogs because you think they’re full of people rambling about pointless details of their mundane lives you’ll hate Twitter, which makes it as easy as possible to post snippets to the web (and your friends’ phones and instant messengers) letting everyone know exactly what you’re doing RIGHT NOW.

Nonetheless, as is my wont, after a first burst of hating the idea, I thought I'd better try it, inspired mainly by Chris posting his design. I started with a very minimal list of users- unlike on Flickr, where I don't mind a stream of photos by people I don't know well but who's work I like- and it was OK, although I suspect it's meant to be used for things more profound than me saying how many cups of tea I manage a day.

The point- yes, I've finally reached it- that annoyed me this morning, though, was that, when looking at the friends of friends, I see lots of entries saying "I'm only giving updates to friends. Add me." Why do this? It smells of "I'm at a fab party but you can't come", an attitude that really annoys me. Why not just not show that user? Or, perhaps, collect a list at the bottom: "you also missed three updates by Matt Jones", or something.

The flipside of this is that other people have noticed me on my friends pages and now want to be added. Generally I'm allowing them, but what happens when someone I don't really know starts poking around? Oh, the social.

Another thing that I've noticed during the writing of this post is that the app seems to be suffering somewhat from its expansion. Perhaps a clue to this is given by the error message "Rails application failed to start properly". Oh.

I expect I'll keep poking at it for another few days, but I expect this to rapidly vanish from my life until (unless?) someone comes visiting London and finds it more convenient than IRC and SMS to arrange nights out.

* by the way, I disagree with Gruber's comment: "Hopefully Flickr will just hand him the keys to their design car — Orchard could give them a serious injection of awesomeness." Flickr is already awesome in a really nice, understated way; they're designed but they don't look it. The last thing they need is page furniture that detracts from the photography. That's not to say that there's not stuff to do, but more that there's no need for a vast revamp.