7 June 2007 Software

Flickr, the Login Barrier and the Great Big WTF

Tags: .

Over the past nine months I’ve been using Flickr to post some photos, and I find it a fascinating place, mainly for the quality of images available on it and the community aspect, but also because it’s an interesting interface example, being unobtrusive and generally pretty easy to use despite constant evolution.

I’ve also been finding recently that there is some nascent — though not exactly lucrative — demand for my photos: some of you may have read of the as-yet unresolved case of the pinched Arse, and there was also a request to use the Portobello Shed picture (the comments for which have been made slightly confusing by the actual request having been deleted by the poster).

So, as I keep an eye on the Flickr Ideas discussions, I was interested to read this thread about making money from pictures. It links through to the “Do More” page, which contains a link saying “start your own online gallery to sell photos.” Great!

Except that on clicking it, I get this (click to enlarge):

The Login Barrier

Aaargh! It’s the Login Barrier. I want a page that tells me how the service works, what I can expect to earn, let me browse their interface, tell me WTF is it? — not a demand to actually hook up my account, accompanied by a disconcerting message warning me of the security risks I accept if I proceed.

So, my first reaction? Yup. Stopped dead. Why should I open up my Flickr account to a third party service before I assure myself of the security and, indeed, usefulness of that service? It’s absurd. If you’re trying to sell a service, why prevent your users from checking it out before signing up? I can think of no real world situation where this happens: It’s like walking into a supermarket and have them ask if they can take an imprint of your credit card before they let you past the foyer.

Looking at the ImageKind site, they provide plenty of info up-front and it’s only a couple of clicks through to the FAQs for sellers. So one has to assume that it’s Flickr that has placed this absurd barrier in the road.

Like I said, Flickr is an interesting user interface example. Just not always a positive one.

Previous:

Next:

Comments

Simon says:

I wouldn’t click on that link in a million years!

Stewart Pratt says:

What, the “ok, I’ll allow it” button?

In fairness, it does state reasonably clearly what level of access you will be granting, and the Flickr account page does allow you to view and maintain attached accounts (I see I have set up a Qoop account with read-only access).

It’s not immediately obvious why ImageKind would need editing and uploading access, though. Certainly not until you’ve used the service for a while and want advanced features.

Simon says:

> What, the “ok, I’ll allow it” button?

Yes. Why would it also need access to your private photos? Surely they’re private for a reason.

Nick says:

Even if you chose to go with imagekind I see no reason why they would need to edit your photo information or to upload to your flickr account.

If the Flickr API isn’t granular enough to allow read only access to my photos then I don’t think it’s granular enough.

Travis says:

Stewart,

This is Travis, from Imagekind. I just wanted to jump in and say that this link from Flickr asks for permissions because it puts into a process on Imagekind that lets you immediately start to work with your photos.

Originally Flickr users were pointed to a general Imagekind landing page, but both companies wanted to see if letting people work with images right away was a better experience. Obviously in your case, it was not. I’m glad you were interested enough to go ahead and seek out info on your own.

Very soon we are going to be pointing users to a landing page especially for Flickr that won’t require any approval until you want to access your photos directly.

As for the actual API permissions, I know that Flickr has a read-only permission available, but we followed their recommendations on access, so there is likely a good reason for it.

I hope you like what you’re experiencing with Imagekind thus far – and just let us know if you ever need any assistance. We try to make ourselves very available to our artists. Thanks for checking us out!

Stewart Pratt says:

Hi Travis – thanks for calling by :)

“both companies wanted to see if letting people work with images right away was a better experience”

It absolutely would be — thing is, you can’t: you have to hook up the account first. From a technical point of view, that’s a small step to take, just a click. But any savvy net user won’t expose account data without thought, and in order to protect non-savvy users, Flickr add lots of warnings about what they’re about to do — though I note they stop short of painitng them red ;)

A “take the tour” option would be a valid alternative, though the ideal would be as follows (which is pretty much what Jeff suggests in his blog):

Users click through from Flickr to a guest account which initially provides access only to a few (or even one) clipart images. Take the clipart, build the products, you just can’t sell until you have your own photos. That guest account can become a fully fledged account with an id as soon as the hookup to Flickr is made – when the user wants to. Any products created from the user’s Flickr images can be sold.

“Very soon we are going to be pointing users to a landing page especially for Flickr that won’t require any approval until you want to access your photos directly.”

To which: yay :)

“As for the actual API permissions, I know that Flickr has a read-only permission available, but we followed their recommendations on access, so there is likely a good reason for it.”

I’d be curious to know why they’d suggest asking for update/edit access — neither seems a prerequisite for printing images.

“I hope you like what you’re experiencing with Imagekind thus far – and just let us know if you ever need any assistance.”

It looks good. Not had too much chance to look thoroughly yet, and I’m in the UK which means I tend to assume shipping times/costs from the US might be problematic, but I’ll check back sometime soon.

Thanks again for the response :)

Nick says:

If you want to see a login barrier try the new MBUK to Bikeradar switch.

It’s obviously been an interesting exercise in transferring user data from one forum to the other but fucking them both up.

I couldn’t create a Bikeradar account because the username and email I choose are already in use. I get no hint that they’re in use from my MBUK account – I have to make that association myself because both forums happen to be from Future publishing.

I couldn’t remember my login to MBUK. No problem I think, I’ll do a password reset. So I go to the MBUK site and do the reset. That tells me it works, go to login, and here we gooooooh no. I still get a login fail. It doesn’t work on Bikeradar either. So now I can’t login to any of the Future forums.

Sod ‘em. If they want to fuck up a perfectly usable user account they just lost this subscriber.

A new, higher, login barrier that loses folk who’ve already climbed over your first one is good going.