Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Defaults and the Snapr culture in Flickr

I'm scouring over the old archives of the Flickr blog and found an interesting bit of statistics (in 2004) on the effects of the default settings for public photos:

[R]atio of postings per active public group to postings per active private group [is 2:9] . To illustrate that defaults matter, in our original design where users had to explicitly make photos public (and couldn’t switch them back), the percentage of public photos in the system hovered around 45%. In the new system where you can set a default for photo privacy settings and the default ‘default’ is public (and you can change the setting at any time) just over 85% of the photos are public.


The bottom line here is that posting public photos are opt-out. While Facebook has had some harsh reactions towards most of their new social features being opt-out, I don't feel the same concerns with Flickr. I guess this is what the Snapr culture [PDF] is all about. Either that or Flickr is doing a much better job at making these options and settings transparent and making such transparencies obvious to the user at the right times (in-task?).

2 comments:

  1. Hey there - thought you might be interested in checking out our service which is relatively new, and is called Snapr! http://sna.pr/

    We spotted this article via the google alert we have for our company name.

    I think what we are trying to do is very much in line with what you are describing, maybe even more so than Flickr, because Snapr is about a constant real time stream of photos.

    With Snapr we are focussed on the real time social and geo-social flow on from photosharing (from mobile devices). It is about showing what's going on where you are (or where your friends are at), bringing lots of photos together into a public channel, and logging your own journey, location included.

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