Flock Blog

Along with the first beta release of the Photobucket edition of Flock, our first "partner edition", we've been doing some thinking on how to meet the sometimes competing requirements of user choice and satisfying partners' legitimate business objectives. Here's an overview of how we thought through that as we worked on the first version of the Photobucket Edition of Flock.

One of our core beliefs is that we have to focus on the user experience first, and put our users' interests ahead of short term business goals. We believe that this will be a key to our long term success as a business. Indeed, one of the core benefits that we think we offer our users, now and even more so going forward, is to break users out of the boxes imposed by web service providers. Like so:

In the screenshot above, I'm looking at an aggregated view of all my new photos, from all of my friends. Some of them are on Flickr, some of them are on Photobucket. Soon, we'll also support Yahoo Photos. And our photos API is open, so we can help any photo provider or community member who is interested in enabling additional photo services in Flock. So as a user, you're not stuck with only being able to view pictures of your friends on Flickr or on Photobucket - your friends' pictures are in any number of places, and you want (and should be able) to see them all at once.

So one of the core principles that we've already articulated to all our partners is that we will always strive to offer our users choice, and we will never take away choice in the version of our browser that we distribute. When you download Flock from our web site, you will continue to have 'equal' access to Flickr, Photobucket and any other photo services we integrate in the future. And, through an extensions-style UI, you'll be able to enable any service for which a web service provider or community member has written an 'adapter', taking advantage of our open APIs.

But what about partner editions? When a partner (say, Photobucket) distributes our browser to their users, that partner has a legitimate interest in putting their services in front of their users and, understandably, they don't want to promote a browser that also promotes their direct competitors. In this particular case, Photobucket, when they promote our browser, doesn't want those users to be exposed in an proactive fashion to other photo services. Fair enough, except that we don't want to ship a crippled version of Flock, and we think users should be able to turn on Flickr in the Photobucket Edition of Flock. We're also aware that Photobucket's user base is very different from the Flickr user base, so as a practical matter, few users who download our browser through Photobucket.com will be looking to access Flickr.

Here's the user flow that we created for this first beta of the Photobucket Edition that we believe balances the various considerations:

1. During the first run of the Photobucket edition, we invite people to configure their Photobucket account in Flock, and tell them about Photobucket integration. Like so:

2. In the account preferences of the Photobucket edition, we only show Photobucket, but the user can click on a "Add Additional Services" link, which shows a listing of all available photo providers (in this case, Flickr in addition to Photobucket). The user can then click on the Install link, and, after a restart, is able to activate their Flickr account in Flock:

We're excited about our new partnership with Photobucket - and we continue to love Flickr as well. We believe that partnerships like the one with Photobucket will yield a better Flock experience for all our users (look forward to some cool new photo-related features over the next week or two, that will benefit both Photobucket and Flickr users).

Did we get it right? Did we miss the mark? Let us know what you think.

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