TrailBlazing

A quick update to the notifications feature of Flickrbook- we’ve decided to go ahead and try making it possible to post to home streams through the addition of a “Post to my friends’ streams” checkbox under the tagging input box.

When checked, you will get a prompt to publish the tag story with thumbnail to your wall, with the advantage that this is supposed to be guaranteed to appear in home streams, not just on your wall. So, please don’t abuse it! I think for most people who are casually browsing and tagging their friends, this will work just fine. However, if you’re about to tag an entire set of photos, please un-check the box before you spam your friends and fill up your wall!

Friends on Flickr was getting to be a mouthful to say and write, so the application is now called Flickrbook!

What’s more, the application now has a fresh and beautiful new design, courtesy of Simona. Whereas the first release was more of a proof-of-concept, closely modeled after Facebook Photos, for the redesign we wanted to make sure that your friends recognize that they’re looking at something different and, we think, better! We wanted a design that would be elegant and clean, more evocative of Flickr than Facebook.

A big part of the redesign is the new photo carousel interface at the top of lists and detail pages- I think that this combines the best of what was previously separated between the grid and list views in the previous version. You get a nice preview of many thumbnails and the ability to quickly page through them, without constantly jumping back and forth between pages and views.

To make tagging faster and easier, I’ve replaced the single-friend input field with the same multiple-friend input field used throughout Facebook, so you can add all the friends you want to tag and submit them in one go. There’s quite a bit of Javascript trickery going on behind the scenes to make this work on the list views (as it was originally designed only to be used once on a page), so let me know if you have any problems with it- I’ve tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome and it seems to be working well.

Finally, the feature you’ve all been waiting for- notifications and wall posts. Tagged friends are sent notifications with links, which will appear in real-time in the notification popup on the toolbar as well as in the Notifications tab of the Inbox. To prevent spamming your friends (and to stay within our Facebook prescribed limits), we send a max of one notification per every two hours. That is, if you are running through a set of photos and tag a friend 10 times in one sitting, he or she will only receive a notification for the first tag, and won’t receive any notifications for the next two hours. It seems conservative, but spam is probably one of the Facebook platform’s biggest issues, so we’ll start from here and adjust based on usage and feedback.

If you’ve allowed access to your profile (i.e. to install the tab), your tagging activity will also appear on your wall, within the same limits as the notifications. By default, you’ll see one-line text posts in the Recent Activity part of your wall. However, you can change that to short stories with thumbnails by changing the application settings within Facebook- unfortunately, this is another one of those convoluted manual processes like installing the profile tab. To change your wall post story settings from one-line text to short story with thumbnail, you must:

•  Open the Applications menu from the toolbar, then click on the Edit link at the top.
• Find Flickrbook and click on Edit Settings in the same row.
• In the Wall tab, choose “Allow Flickrbook to publish specific story sizes automatically without prompting.” and then choose Short

Note that, due to recent changes in story publishing policy introduced with the recent Facebook redesign and streams, these wall posts will not appear in your home stream or your friends’ home streams. I’m still trying to figure out if we can post into the stream without spamming it with every single tag you add and without cluttering the tagging  interface with more options.

Other little improvements- in your Settings you can now choose to also add your friends’ names as text tags on your Flickr photos, a request from David on the wall of the application page. Also, we’ve added the Facebook comments box to photos (also linked to short story wall posts) so that friends can comment within Facebook without having to go to Flickr. Please let us know what you think of these changes and continue to leave feedback on our application page, we appreciate it!

Recently, while backing up and “spring cleaning” my pc, I realized it was time to finally get my wedding photo film scans onto the web. I needed the web repository to be a place that could give me access to the original high-res files after uploading, so I turned to Flickr and signed up for a Pro account. At the same time, I knew that more of my friends who were at the wedding are on Facebook and that it would be a shame not to have the photos easily accessible and browsable through the photo friend tagging feature.

I was suprised that I couldn’t find a good Facebook application for this, particularly since there are already many photos tagged with the facebook:user=<id> machine tag in the public Flickr collection. So, I went ahead and built one for myself called Flickrbook. You can browse public photos from Flickr tagged with Facebook friends, link your own Flickr account and tag your own photos, and you can grant permission to your Facebook friends (including those without a Flickr account) to tag your public photos.

It was a nice little design and development exercise with the Facebook Platform- a chance for me to catch up on changes since I last worked with the platform as one of the 25 launch partners at the first F8 press conference. The platform is as stable as quicksand, but despite the grumblings of the developer community, they do seem to be making the changes for the best. I haven’t incorporated news feed publishing into Flickrbook yet, and a good thing, too- the new homepage design is forcing all developers to re-adjust their news story templates for the new stream, so I’ll spend some time with it before finalizing on a news feed and publisher design.

On top of that, it was also a nice little learning exercise with Google App Engine, which I used to develop and host the application. Having most recently worked with Amazon Web Services, I was impressed by the ease and speed of development afforded by the higher-level application and platform abstractions in App Engine. It’s not quite appropriate for all applications yet, though- the lack of asynchronous background processes and a binary data store being the two prominent holes in the platform. That being said, it’s perfect for Flickrbook and similar API mashup applications that are basically coordinating requests between platforms (in this case, between the Flickr and Facebook platforms).

If you’re a Flickr user, please do give Flickrbook a try and post your feedback below, I’d be interested in hearing what you think.