Six Degrees of FlickrNation

Non-Tech City: Flickr Idea: From Non-Tech City: "Another good option would be to be able to see a page of all the links that point to you from within Flickr, to enable you to see whose photostreams you are in. This brings about all sorts of fascinating possibilities with the social networking side of things, which would enable people to write code to draw network diagrams of who is in whose stream, like a six degrees of separation idea."

Non-Tech City is blogging about something that I and others have been asking for for a while from Flickr. Why not let us see where our referrals are coming from?

While not exactly a sitemeter account per se, it would be helpful for me to know where/who fav'd traffic is coming from, what outside blogs are linking to my photos, what groups I'm being mentioned in, etc. It would seem to me that this would further foster community and I can't think of a good reason not to do it.

I brought this idea up to Stewart at the SF Apple Flickr meetup and he said that if they did this that people would spam it. I'm not sure that I agree with this. I have a sitemeter account for both of my blogs and people don't spam that.

For a while in the deleteme uncensored group a lot of us were playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game was a lot of fun for all of us and I was looking like a regular genius until Big Frank had to blow all the fun and point out that we were just using the Oracle of Bacon to make the connections -- (hey who says using a computer is cheating). After that we passed a rule aimed directly at BigFrank in the group that finking wasn't allowed any more... but I digress.

If Flickr added referral activity one fun Flickr toy someone could create would be the six degrees of FlickrNation. Similar to the Oracle of Bacon (and I guess kind of like Linked in?), you could enter in your Flickr user ID and any other Flickr user ID and find the connections through other users. Flickr members could provide introductions for other Flickr members, etc. etc. I like that idea a lot.