Linkedin vs. Flickr: On activating a social audience

Or, in more affected businsss-y language that I know Aaron Cope likes me to use, creating a channel for increased customer engagement.

Linkedin, which this morning announced another one of their new features, this one about data trends, has got me thinking.

First you have to credit Linkedin for popping out a lot of stuff of late in their march towards an IPO later this year. Bravo. But more impressive has been their creation of an activity stream, which not only encourages more linkedin usage, but also provides a channel to get their customers to try their new features. It's the vessel that they can keep using to drive customers to their new ideas. This is something that we tried and failed to do during my time at Flickr.

Linkedin, which long struggled to get people to use the site when they weren't in a job search, turned the lights on their activity stream at first by aping Facebook, and has continued to evolve their experience into something that is uniquely suited to professional networking.


What they've done is create a primary place for someone to talk to their network. You don't have to go to some far off place like a group, you just post a status update or a link. And, acknowledging that they don't own all the professional dialog that goes on on the internet, they have a logical and expansive integration with Twitter.

And people see it, and interact with it. So, as LinkedIn launches an experimental data product, or a search product, or any of the other new things that they're cooking up, they have a place to get it in front of their members.


Whereas, at Flickr, the paridigm of a members activity never moved beyond the original construct of photos.


When Flickr set out in 2008 to redesign the main page of Flickr, we brought brilliant folks together, but we didn't account for the importance of objects/ vessels other than photos from your contacts. Tags, long important in Flickr's genesis, didn't make the cut, nor photo-sets, nor advertisers....

There are so many reasons why this didn't happen, but who needs to dwell on the hurt.

But as a result, over time when we had new features that we wanted to habituate our customers to...

* Galleries
* App Garden
* People Tags
* Getty Images
* Sponsored Groups

We just threw them out into the world and hoped that they would just work and become popular. Most found modest success, but few of these amounted to any change in Flickr's strategic course. Arguably, this remains Flickr's biggest hurdle to in defining its role in he future of social media.

Galleries, which was a labor of love for a number of us, had (has?) tremendous potential, but notably found its greatest popularity through the distribution channels not of Flickr, but via Twitter and even the Yahoo.com homepage.

Does this mean that everyone should go and build a facebook-like activity stream into their social products?

I think not neccessarily. There are other ways to channel the most important content and features to your customers -- Google has shown us how extensible the search result experience is-- but one should build some sort of distribution channel deep into your product. At Flickr, I always thought that there was a way to do this with photos and visualizations, but who knows what we would have ended up with via trial and error.