Every modern social media Web site has it. It’s the feature that lets you allow a Web site go into your address book or e-mail provider and add/invite them to join you on the said network. Flickr has it now. What Flickr did so wrong, was that they didn’t anticipate their user’s needs. Let’s extrapolate on this…
Flickr, an online photo sharing service, allows users to upload their digital camera’s contents easily into their account. Sometimes people unknowingly have an undesirable photo that lets loose in their public pictures. The problem in their new feature, they don’t explicitly ask users if their photos should remain public or private (double opt-in). In business terms, this is understandable since the only asset Flickr has is user generated content, however…
When you make it too easy to get all your e-mailed contacts on over to your Flickr photosets, it can be a bit troubling for users who didn’t set their privacy settings or specify what photos their newly found contacts can view. Flickr even did everything right — they got all the nods of approval from Industry leaders, they make users triple-opt-in to the choice to invite users, but they missed one thing: anticipating user feedback.
In their blog entry, they don’t make it vividly clear on how to set privacy settings (for less experienced users). C’mon Flickr, make your user’s happy and remind them about their privacy settings. Don’t be Facebooked.
In other news, Microsoft made a significant move in acquiring Yahoo. Flickr-ers, time to revolt (again).
[Links via Techmeme]
[Image credit: Jason Sherwin]
