O'Reilly Radar > Flickr and Interestingness

O'Reilly Radar > Flickr and Interestingness:

More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results "interesting" for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out "interestingness" as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.

I love flickr. I spend way more time on it than I should, not just on my own photos, but simply exploring. I sit and reload "Explore interesting photos" just to see what pops up, and I've really come to appreciate how groups on that site build community and help identify and classify photos. They're doing some awesome stuff there.

And interestingness is a great prototype -- but it's merely a prototype. It needs to be taken to the next level. My key issue with it? There is no single definition of "interestingness".

I am, frankly, just not interested in soft-focus shots of pouty-lipped women in exotic (or merely tight) clothing. I don't care how well executed they are, those photos just aren't high on my list of things to search for. Neither are still life's of Pears or moblog phone shots from downtown tokyo.

This doesn't make these bad shots, or even "not interesting" shots; it makes them "not interesting to me" shots. And interestingness on flickr is global and universal.

Picking three shots semi-randomly:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uji/219210546/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beesparkle/218551581/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13525066@N00/216740106/

all came out of interestingness; I can safely say that only one of them qualifies as "really interesting" to me, one more somewhat. Which I'll leave for you to guess, because this isn't a case of good/bad. What I will say is that I think the chances of any one person finding all three of those photos very interesting is quite small.

What flickr needs to do is find that next level. not "interestingness", but "my interestingness". It has the meta data already: the photos I've marked as favorites, the groups I join, the groups I contribute to, the tags I use, the sets I build. building me a custom RSS feeds of photos I'll find interesting -- now that's interestingness.

It is also, if you think about it, a huge technical and data manipulation challenge. But that's "merely" engineering. And it's what Interestingness OUGHT to be.

going down that path, though, you have to be wary. At the far end of that path is Amazon, where, when you buy a rice cooker, happily shows you a dozen other rice cookers you might want to buy, also. The more you reinforce past decisions by limiting access to information based on them, the more you risk creating an echo chamber of increasingly tunnel-visioned data sets (and people). There are times when I want to see things that fit into my core areas of interest; and there are times when I frankly want to be surprised, want to be shaken out of my rut and pushed in new directions, to run across something I wasn't looking for and didn't know I'd like until I saw it.

Sometimes it's a fresh perspective on things, and sometimes, it's just something that touches you, and you have to go ponder why.

Or say the hell with it, and go outside with the camera...

Interestingness is interesting, but not as interesting as it will be some day. When it adapts to what the individual is interesting, and goes beyond that to helping them find what they don't know to look for -- THAT will be true interestingness.

(back later. camera calls..)

update: here's Fraser, and his call for an "awesomeness detector". And that information is already IN Flickr. It's "just" a matter of figuring out how to mine it, and scaling that data mining to the entire population.

And now that I think about it, one thing that REALLY bothers me about Flickr's interestingness as it's currently implemented is that it's absolutely non-transparent. It's clear it takes into consideration how many views (and the rate of viewing) and # of favorites, and comments, but it does other things, too -- and those aren't defined anywhere I've found....

Comments

[bee]

MMMmmmmm very interesting to read! Actually a lot of people really liked that photo I posted. Not that I put it into Explore but they obviously thought it good enough to be!
Beesparkle