Oh hai, Ben Ward!

What's this?

This is a mock up of a summary feed for Flickr contact activity.

Rather than be swamped under the weight of a stream of photographs from all your contacts (or being limited to just your friends), this view would be based on a concept of ‘Friend Interestingness’, not just the Family/Friend/Contact classifications that already exist.

What's Flickr?

Flickr is crack. You should really know that by now.

What's this for?

So, you have contacts. Probably lots of them. Certainly too many to keep up with all at once and on a daily basis. You probably stalk your significant other hourly, just in case, but everyone else passes by.

You may miss some photographs because you're overloaded by the quantity of new content presented to you at once. Plus, you probably look at a lot of photographs with indifference, ones you'd prefer to have skipped over.

How does this work?

The fundamental concept at work is that the more interesting a person is to you, the more likely they are to be displayed in the summary, and the most interesting will be displayed always.

That interestingness is determined by as much data as can be mined from the Flickr activity logs. Friend/Family status helps, so does the frequency you view someone's photos, the frequency you view their photos on individual pages rather than just in the stream, when you view full size images, how many comments you leave on their photographs and the number of times you add their images to your favourites.

… the number of groups you share with them, perhaps score more if you're both admins or moderators. Maybe count the number of FlickrMails which have been sent between you.

In the end, produce a score. Rank all the contacts in terms of interestingness. Use that score to determine if an upload is going to register in the summary, whether it's just text or whether it shows previews too.

What else?

Additionally, the importance of a person's upload, or multiple people's related uploads can be influenced by the tags they use. Lots of semi- intersting contacts uploading photographs into the same tag cluster, or better yet into the same tag cluster as some of your photos, will elevate the importance of that upload.

Similarly, someone uploading photographs from an Upcoming.org event that you attended or watched will score higher than that person might normally.

Other times, a semi-interesting contact will upload a really interesting photograph, as determined by the existing concept of interestingness. That'll get shown, too.

But I'm paranoid! Surely I'll miss something good?

Catered for. The summary is there to provide your through-the-day Flickr shot. At the end of each day in the summary stream, you get a link to view all the photographs from each ‘cluster’ of friends. Again, a little granularity goes a long way to making it digestable.

At the base of the whole feed, you can catch up with every photo taken in each cluster since the cluster was last viewed. Never miss a thing.

Who are you?

I'm Ben Ward. I'm a Web Developer and serial Flickr-significant-other-stalker in the London office.

bward@yahoo-inc.com.