Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

There seem to be more and more applications which use the API of Flickr (which I also used for Blinks and Buttons) for commercial ends. I first noticed that two days ago when clicking on an ad for the new Nikon D80 on WMMNA. The link took me to a Flash-based site which very much resembles many of the more artistic applications – a cloud of images etc, and it’s actually very well executed. When you click on an indivual image, it will tell you who made it, including a link to their Flickr-account where the image is supposedly also being referenced from.

I was very excited about that for a few minutes until it occurred to me that all the user’s accounts are not older than a few weeks and probably have been set up as part of the campaign. There’s also a suspiciously big amount of mirror-shots where you see the Nikon, including comments like “great cam, where did you get it” and such. It still looks like they gave the cameras to photograpers to document their daily activities, very few shots actually seem posed. It is a bit fake-ish, but I still like it. The more interesting part though, is that most apparently the creative mash-ups which for some time have been the exclusive domain of the media-art community are being discovered by the marketing crowd. Today, I also found on Lifehacker that Flickr runs their own permanent research about their customer’s cameras. If this data is correct (certain accounts for some reason don’t seem to properly show EXIF-data about the type of camera), there’s a surprising amount of pretty good hardware being used. This might just be advertising better cameras as well, though.

Of course – and it’s so obvious – all the metadata that people leave on the social websites are a true goldmine, and there are certainly more interesting things that favorite bands on MySpace. With using the shared metadata from devices (again referring to Blinks & Buttons or to Julian’s Blogject) and other metainformation very finely grained profiles of both usage and users can be constructed and employed. We knew that, and this might be one of the first examples.