how we used to, how we will

@ericsoco transmote.com

How we used to. How we will.

i’m eric socolofsky, a FE eng at flickrshawn asked me here to speak about…somethinggave some thought, decided to focus on something important to me, which is…

where do good things come from?

trying to find some answers to this questionwhat processes and culture encourage creation of good things?

innovation!

I’ll be using words today like ‘innovation’,

inspiration!

and ‘inspiration’, but I want to be sure you understand I don’t mean them in the corporate clip-art kind of way.

Nervous System lamp, by Shapeways

More interested in investigating the processes by which we makebeautiful, usable objects and experiencesWhether it’s generative furniture design, (jessica is here at FITC too!) or…

Faraday Bicycle by Richard Masoner

…the design and engineering of stylish electric bicycles or…

Watercolor Map by Stamen Design

…dreaming up beautiful maps and making them available to anyone for web and print or…

Obscura Digital projection, by Exploratorium (Lowell Robinson)

…creating immersive video narratives and projection mapping them onto buildings or…

Herzog & De Meuron atrium, by rosmary

or exploring new materials and designing the buildings themselves, it’s about process and culture and the people who make things.

since i’m working at flickr now, and flickr has such a long history on the internets,thought it would be interesting to examinethe processes and culture that have allowed flickr to innovate over the years.

so….who are you?

So who are you to tell me about innovation?marked on the program as ‘inspire’ and ‘UX/UI’ tracks,but here’s a front end engineer talking to you…but there’s some other things, too…

background in architecture; design educationlearned about iterative process and design thinking at the beginning of my educationworked for a few years as an architect, then went to grad school

by Ann Poochareon

graduated ITP 2004

by Dan Phiffer

part of tisch school of the arts, NYU2-year grad program with broad focus on tech, arts, interaction designbrings people in from diverse fields like architecture, fine arts, engineering, dance and music, philosophy and humanities

found out about flickr a few weeks before public launch, feb 2004stewart contacted me to make some pretty flash things for the alpha FlickrLivebeen on flickr ever since, as a consistent (if not heavy) user

by Shawn Clover

a few years went by in nyc,then i moved out to sf for a gig at the Explo, museum of science, art, and human perception; highly interactive exhibits that demonstrate scientific phenomenaworked there for 6 years as exhibit developer

designing and building physical-digital hybrid interfaces to teach people about geometry,

interactive visualizations of ship traffic in San Francisco bay,

by Gayle Lairdby Amy Snyder

interfaces for exploring life in the world’s oceans,

by Gayle Laird

physical representations of the patterns of the tides visible just outside the windows.

i also created a screen-based interactive that allows visitors to explore the neighborhood of the museum’s new location, through photos posted on flickrthat same year, i felt ready to leave explo, and ended up coincidentally? at flickr.

…?

wanted to take culture of innovation and iterative design with meWhen Shawn asked me to speak, decided to speak to thatopportunity to learn about how flickr used to do this in the past,and how we will moving forward.

so, took it upon myself to hunt down old-skool and new-school flickereenos alike,ask them for their stories about how things got done.will use flickr history/timeline as scaffold for examining ways of workingthat encourage new ideas; bring them to users.

Game Neverending to Yahoo!

2003 - 2005

first era of flickr history[—6:00—]

by Julian Fong

in the beginning… there was web 1.0.weblogs were a hit. livejournal, blogger, and moveable type were taking the internet by storm.friendster had just launched; myspace and facebook were still a ways off.

by hobvias sudoneighm

stewart, caterina, and a handful of other brave souls opened up GNEMMORPG about…being socialcaterina described it as a “social object”…

by krispijn larrison

…“social object”; like board game or team sport,activity to gather around to be socialindeed, modern “social software” originated with the communities on GNEthat grew into flickr

by Juan Felipe Rubio

popular feature of Game Neverending: Flickr Live (sharing photos)photos as social lubricant in realtime chat, to increase community engagementstart of movement toward current: social engagement around aesthetic objects

flickr launched to the public

by Brandon Giesbrecht

from there, grew very fast, with a ton of features right out of the gate

by Kodak via burnick

consumer-level digital photography was super newpeople making digital artifacts but didn’t know what to do with thema lot of new things, lots of opportunity;core suite of features emerged that heralded the coming of Web 2.0:

by Steve Rotman

tagsdelicious first, flickr right afterpeople tag photos, others find and tag in kind,community grows around shared content

for FEM Business, by Jeroen Mirck

sharing (weblogs)some blog software actually instructed users to host images on flickr because no image hosting options existed in blog software at that point

by etringita

favingattribution of value in social context

by Dion Hinchcliffe

AJAX: change webpage without reload. one of main features of “Web 2.0”Imagine: a web page, with a photo and a title.You click on the title, it turns into an input field; you type a new title.You hit enter. The title is changed. Amaze!

See something or say something by Eric Fischer

Flickr Flow by Viegas & Wattenberg

first major site to provide public API (aug 2004, few months after launch)make user-generated data available to anyone to play withbeautiful visualizations like these, useful apps built on flickr data

by john allspaw

by john allspaw by Deadly Pink Rhino

pioneered continuous integration: deploy small changes many times/dayenabled by practice of devops (popularized by flickr)devs watch graphs like these that describe critical site performance metrics,everyone takes responsibility for uptime and performance

drop the vowel. who needs vowels?

by Pete Prodoehl

1. Prototype

possible to build all these early features quickly by prototyping themprototyping started in GNE: quickly built features and handed them to userssame process @ explo: get minimal version to museum visitors asapto get a sense of what works and what doesn’t

13:00

by David B. Gleason

prototypes built into products by watching userscaterina calls this “design by dogpaths”**don’t describe dogpaths**watch how users use prototypes, design them toward those use cases

by eric socolofsky

2. Stay close to your users

prototyping and designing like this requires close contact with userseasier with small team: staff engagement with every photo in beginningclose communication with users creates strong community

by Webgrisu

early successes attracted a lot of attentionyahoo bought flickr in march 2005for the bargain basement price of $30MM

Yahoo! to Caterina and Stewart’s departure

2005 - 2008

brings us to second era[—15:00—]

by r. nial bradshaw

a lot of growth during this period

2004 2006 2007

product evolved quickly, from beta to gamma and all the way to loves youbut first thing that happened after acquisition was integration, scaling, infrastructuresix-month blue sky period for thinking, but not making

by The Library of Congress

3. Downtime

downtime is important. need to let mind wander.time for free associations and reshuffling memories; discover new connectionsduring this time, dreamed up a lot of thingsturned into features about encouraging exploration of growing content

by The Library of Congress

the commons on flickrpublic domain images from institutions around the worldfirst U.S. Lib of Congress; later British Lib, recently Internet Archive Book Imagesjust last month hit 100th institutiona real-life rosie the riveter

by Stuart Rankin

lots of great geo and maps featuresfeatures came from the community:tags -> machine tags; machine tags -> geotagsled to robust maps with geotagged photos and other geo features

slew of geo features, led largely by dan catt and aaron straup copeplaces: left lonely but still appreciated by some (googlebot)

still there at flickr.com/places

explore page: curated byinterestingness algorithmprovide high quality and popular photos from each day

by Nate Burgos

4. Iteration

a lot of these features started as small experiments;pushed them out behind feature flippers, listened to feedback, iteratedbuilt new versions based on successes/failures of old; validate ideasexhibit development process @ explo[—19:00—]

by thomas hawk

in the meantime, the site grew more mature and more complexways to display/organize photos:

photostream, sets, collections, galleries, group poolsways to communicate with other members:

forum, groups, comments, notes, flickrmail

by Roman Boed

growth of user-uploaded content: ~10 million in april 2005;200 million by mid-2006;2 billion images before end of 2007200x growth in 2-1/2 years

by National Library of Ireland

flickr as caretaker of all this content generated by its usersfocus on quality, longevityall roles present at product direction meetings:

product, design, FE, BE, community

by The Library of Congress

5. Small teams

attention to detail and quality from small, cross-functional teams(maybe 4 or 5 people across product, design, engineering, community)mantra of "small teams are able to do bigger things than big teams”easier/more consistent communication, ideas flow quicker, fewer things fall through the cracks.

by kris krüg by Joi Ito

stewart and caterina from the beginningcaterina went on to start brickhouse (idea incubator);stewart became sole leader

by SMU Central University Library

6. Strong vision

people i interviewed credited stewart as strong leaderwith concrete product ideas & focus, good communicatorleader to bring together streams of creativity and passion into cohesive directiondifficult to cultivate or seek out, but hold onto it if you find it

by Wes Peck

caterina hit the road in june 2008,stewart right after in july.what would become of flickr without this centralizing force?

Caterina and Stewart’s departure to

Marissa’s arrival

2008 - 2012

next period in flickr history spans between time caterina and stewart leftto time marisa mayer took over as yahoo CEO22:00

by Kroejsanka Mediteranka

troubled times for growing flickrgeneration shift: along with stewart and caterina, others followedgrowing lack of attention / resources from yahooworld changing rapidly around flickr (mobile, local, realtime… ->)

by George Agpoon

all icons from The Noun Project collection

by Phil Goodwin by Richard de Vos

during this time: rise of mobile, local, real-timemobile photography no longer a new thing (e.g. instagram, 2010)GPS in phones gave rise to location-based apps (e.g. foursquare, 2009)real-time (e.g. twitter, 2006, but matured from SMS to app 2010)

by Fortune Live Mediaby JD Lasicaby Yahooby Yahoo

troubled times for yahoo: 4 CEOs within 3-1/2 years

by Tracy

not clear who was sailing the ship, or where the ship was even going;despite turbulence, flickr had already established itself as a place for people who wanted to build great thingspeople stayed because they were passionate about what flickr had been;new people joined because they were passionate about what flickr could become.

by Hafiz Issadeen

7. Passion

passion, as represented by lovely slide of passion fruitwhile it’s not the easiest thing to find, it’s always one of the most valuabledrive to create comes from personal interest; bring own ideas to the tableownership of ideas; motivation to maintain quality

as an act of passion, launched code blog, as place to:- think out loud, share ideas with public- connect with other (third-party) flickr developers- display behind-the-scenes and recruit

by Amit Gupta

that passion attracted people from outside flickr to experimentflickr bikes: geotagged photos uploaded automatically;accelerometer detects in-motion, nokia n95, solar panelscoincidentally by uncommon projects (people from my grad school, ITP)

by possan

one danger here: if you have passionate people working without shared vision /strong leadership to coordinate efforts,this “unbridled passion” can lead to a mess, with experiments that are interesting in their own right, but don’t fit into overall product, complicate UX, maintenancedespite difficulties, still new things: people tagging; new web uploader; more geo features:

Making Flickr awesome again

2012 - present

so, all of this brings us to the modern age…[—26:00—]

by John Fowler

context: as of end of 2014:10B photos100MM (unique) users, 7.5MM uploads/day (5000+ per min)

by Adam Evans

meanwhile: 2B photos per day (20% flickr corpus) across FB, instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, flickrmobile surpasses desktophigher user expectations (UX quality); real competition: exposure, 500pxpeople saying flickr is dead (and yahoo killed it, famously detailed by mat honan)

and yet, people still care: marissa comes on as yahoo CEO in july 2012,and one day later sean bonner launches “dear marissa mayer”gets picked up on and echoed widely in social media

a day after that, we learn that people at flickr still care, tooposted this call for help in responsemarissa did indeed decide to focus on flickr…

by joshnh

last couple years there’s been renewed investment in flickr from yahooreciprocal renewed relationship with yahoofocus on reinvigorating; catching upget flickr to a place where it’s simple to upload, organize, and find your photos

by Ismael Alanso

share and engage community around photos

by Eric Montfort

discover new content

by Valentina Calà

and once again become the “eyes of the world”.stewart came up with motto in 2006…(one more slide here)

by U.N. Photo

…”eyes of the world” motto in 2006 to describe being able tosee the world through the lenses of the photographers on flickrhowever, iteration and innovation difficult with fast pace, focus on reviving flickr

by Ruth Hartnup

relaid foundation for FE: rebuilt as an isomorphic Node.js SPA in early 2013modern stack means faster page loads/nav, more flexibility, faster iterationability to attract top-notch developers interested in new, cutting-edge techsimilar rebuilding happening on backend, too early to discuss

by Tambako the Jaguar

8. Agile

process we use now is agile developmentquick explanation: 1-2 week sprints, daily scrum/standupgreat for plowing through tasks, but *not* great for experimentationno downtime, time for iteration only if baked into estimates

by Randall Munroe / xkcd

still, possible to make room for experiments in periphery of agile timelineXKCD comic end of last yeareasy: use GPS to determine if photo is in a parkvirtually impossible: determine if photo is of a bird

computer vision + search team put together this site in responseparkorbird.flickr.com

by Bhautik Joshi / Flickr

subset of flickr team explicitly devotes time to explorationdata science team made “the grid”: access photo pixels and metadataallows us to ask questions like camera usage across flickr (recent blog post)

by Bart Thomee / Yahoo Labs

yahoo labs: mission to explore technologies for long term (2-5 years out)regionizr: geo + statistics to create descriptive outlines based on tagsphoto recs: computer vision + social signalsgroup recs, suggested tags, improving interestingness algodata science and labs teams: projects that straddle disciplines require diverse team

by Ryan Somma

9. Diversity

Labs group has diverse backgrounds, skillsets, interests: AI, HCI infoviz, geo, CVITP does the same; ideas come from friction among different disciplinesTo achieve diversity, network among multiple disciplinesWithin team, encourage people to embrace friction, not fight itby embracing… ->

by FraserElliot

by embracing successes of past and employing new techniques + technology,we’re growing back into a healthy, mature productnow that we’ve rebuilt substantially, a lot of new ideas on the near horizon

by Petras Gagilas

10. Two paths

from the conversations i’ve had and from personal experience,i see two distinct paths from which innovative work can arise

by [Alexandre]

“deductive innovation”: determine specific goal to achieve, need to addressfollows linear path to high-probability solutiontech industry as example: hundreds or thousands of successful single-purpose apps,each makes some specific task easier or iterates on the previousidea of innovating along a linear path is so pervasive in tech scene that it’s become a caricature

idea of innovating along a linear path is so pervasive in tech scene that it’s become a caricaturethe world’s first entirely AI startup accelerator, launchnik.com: "the uber of..." (pants, cheese, headbands).despite caricature, end results are functional, successful;may not be wildly innovative, tend to be iterations of existing products

by Smithsonian Institution

the other way around: instead of a linear path, try lots of quick prototypes;i call this “inductive innovation”: through experimentation and iterationyou can arrive at solution with lower probability of solving specific problembut higher probability of generating new use cases and broadening playing field.

by Laura Thorne

“inductive innovation” results in emergent behavior.build some tools/toys, put into hands of users, let *them* innovate.tags -> machine tags, geotags, maps/placesFlickr as series of experiments in digitally-mediated social interaction

that evolved into language of social software on the web

by Derek Bruff

depending on your situation, you can choose either pathflickr is at an interesting point in time, in which both paths are useful:linear, deductive innovation to get us back on track and back on solid footing;experimental, inductive innovation to invent the future. FULL STOP

Aaron Straup Cope Ayman Shamma

Bernardo Hernandez Bertrand Fan Caterina Fake

Christopher Berry Chris Martin

Dan Catt Daniel Bogan

Dunstan Orchard

Eric Costello George Oates

Heather Champ Markus Spiering

Matthew Rothenberg Peter Norby Phil Dokas

Ross Harmes Trevor Hartsell

Simon Osindero

Special thanks to:

font: Aller by Dalton Maag

trying to find some answers to this questionwhat processes and culture encourage creation of good things?

@ericsoco transmote.com/talks/fitc-2015

flickr.com/jobs

Thanks. (to you!)

thanks to you in the audience!please get in touch: @ericsoco (flickr, twitter, vimeo)slides on transmotewe’re hiring!