birdfeed:

Flickr

One of the features I’ve always wanted in a Twitter client is Flickr support. In my opinion, an ecosystem of third party, Twitter-specific image sharing services thrives at least in large part because their authentication scheme (simply using users’ existing Twitter credentials) is easier for third party developers to implement than Flickr’s somewhat involved (but arguably superior), OAuth-like mechanism. I was a Flickr user long before I was a Twitter user, and in a lot of ways using anything other than Flickr for my image sharing has always bothered me.

Of course adding Flickr support isn’t like simply bolting on “yet another Twitter image sharing service.” In designing the Birdfeed Flickr user experience, I took into account a few unique factors:

• Unlike TwitPic or yFrog accounts, Flickr accounts aren’t implicitly tied to Twitter accounts. It’s possible that a user of multiple Twitter accounts would want to use a particular Flickr account for posting images from all of their Twitter accounts, but equally possible they wouldn’t. It seems likely that a lot of people would want to, say, keep photos taken for their business account out of their personal Flickr photos (or vice-versa). However, it would be nice if someone who did want to use a single Flickr account for everything had the option to.
• I’ve often found OAuth-like authentication experiences confusing in iPhone apps—mainly, I think, because they’re not sufficiently explained, it’s often unclear when they’ve worked and what they’ve done, and they disrupt the user’s context.
• Users of Flickr are slightly more “precious” about their photos, and are more likely to care about image aesthetics and metadata.

With the first factor in mind, I implemented Birdfeed’s in-app setting such that a Flickr account that is added for any Twitter account can be set as the image sharing service for any other Twitter account. This allows an unlimited number of Flickr accounts to be associated with an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. This way users can:

• Use the same Flickr account for every Twitter account.
• Use a different Flickr account for every Twitter account.
• Use Flickr for some Twitter accounts and yFrog, TwitPic, or Posterous for others.

Once a Flickr account is authorized, it can be used as a replacement for the usual Twitter image sharing services thanks to Flickr’s “flic.kr” short URLs. There is only one difference in the experience: for Flickr (and, incidentally, Posterous) uploads, Birdfeed now presents a photo metadata sheet that allows the user to specify a title, description, and tags for a photo before it is uploaded. As I said, I believe Flickr users think of their photos as a bit less disposable than users of traditional Twitter image sharing services, and therefore I suspect they care more about controlling the associated metadata.