Social Browsing on Flickr

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how social browsing on Flickr, through contacts' photo streams, is a primary method for users discovering new images, highlighting its importance for personalized recommendations.

Contribution

It provides an extensive analysis demonstrating that social browsing via contacts is a key image discovery method on Flickr, informing recommendation system design.

Findings

Social browsing is a primary image discovery method.

Contacts' photo streams significantly influence user activity.

Implications for personalized recommendation systems.

Abstract

The new social media sites - blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and Flickr, among others - underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The photo-sharing site Flickr, for example, allows users to upload photographs, view photos created by others, comment on those photos, etc. As is common to other social media sites, Flickr allows users to designate others as ``contacts'' and to track their activities in real time. The contacts (or friends) lists form the social network backbone of social media sites. We claim that these social networks facilitate new ways of interacting with information, e.g., through what we call social browsing. The contacts interface on Flickr enables users to see latest images submitted by their friends. Through an extensive analysis of Flickr data, we show that social browsing through the contacts' photo streams is one of the primary methods by which users find new images on Flickr. This finding has implications for creating personalized recommendation systems based on the user's declared contacts lists.