Brian.Shaler.name | Blog | Alright, a Little Too Much Digging.. Off to Flickr!

Alright, a Little Too Much Digging.. Off to Flickr!

May 17, 2007

I've noticed recently that I've been spending quite a bit of time analyzing and building tools for Digg (I'll explain this recent Digg blitz in the near future). As I've said before, Digg is an ideal target for such endeavors, but there are other fish in the sea.

As far as active online communities go, Flickr is an excellent target. It helps that I've been using Flickr for a year or so, much like it helped to be a semi-veteran Digger when I started building 3rd party Digg tools.

AutoSmile

I started off small, by releasing an unfinished plug-in for Firefox (via Greasemonkey) called AutoSmile. It allows you to seamlessly add emoticons to your Flickr photo comments.

Wait.

Emoticons?

Yes, emoticons. Now, I should start by saying that I'm not a big fan of emoticons myself. I don't think they're unnecessary, and they usually border on being an annoyance. However, if you examine the target audience for emoticons, you'll see that they have broad appeal to just about any demographic but the web professional community. Go to the AutoSmile download page for more details about the tool.

In the Near Future..

Even though I'm not quite ready to walk away from AutoSmile (a couple more features left to add), I came up with an idea for a bigger and better Flickr tool. I think it might make a dent in how people use Flickr and discover interesting photos. Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to disclose the details on this project with everyone.

For now, I'm just looking for people who would like to test and provide feedback on the prototype. If you're a Flickr member that uses Firefox, contact me: brian@shaler.name

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