Flickr Adds Some Web 2.0 to a User’s Homepage

Yesterday Flickr announced a redesign to a user’s homepage that is intended to give more place to social features of Flickr and provide some more customization opportunities. The explanation offered is very simple - there are so many things you can do on Flickr and some of the activities may stay completely unnoticed unless they are pushed at you, like the activity in the groups you belong to.

Flickr does not change anything about the look and feel of the site but slightly rearranges what you get upon login. For example, right now every user gets to see the latest from 3 groups of photos: his own photos, photos from his contacts and everyone’s photos. Now the idea seems to be that everyone’s photos is not actually related to user’s activities and decided to remove this section completely not to clutter the page (I am a little disappointed about that as I have discovered some excellent photographers via this functionality).

So instead we get more photos from the user’s photo stream along with more photos from contacts and photos from groups as well the user belongs to as well. But one thing is more important - you can actually hide everything you want to hide from the homepage and only use the available space for the blocks you actually want to pay attention to.

There is also a new focus on social features with a dedicated tab to see the recent activity on your photos easier. Another thing that is easier accessible now is statistics for views of your photos - it is available with one click from the home page as well and this must be a nice idea for a every statistics addict.

The process of rolling the new design out to all the users will take a few weeks but we can switch to the new homepage already by clicking the link “Want a sneak peek at your new home page?” located to the bottom of the current page.

Clicking this link will open a window where a user will be explained that he is offered to move to a new version of Flickr before it becomes official. But be careful - you won’t be able to switch back if you don’t like the redesign - or at least I have not found any “go back to the previous layout” link anywhere.

And since the team seems to expect some objections (true, there are no cases when everyone is happy with any redesign with at least some users claiming it used to be better), they offer everyone to share feedback and probably we will see some changes implemented based on users’ feedback.