Do you love Flickr?

Last week, Flickr.com very quietly announced that it Loves You.



It's common for software to go through a release cycle of pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta releases, with the Beta release usually signifying that the software is complete and is usable, but is still in a period of testing.

Flickr has gone through Alpha, Beta and, unusually, Gamma phases, each one being labelled in it's logo on each page, and each release phase marked by new features being released to it's members. The "Gamma" label was apparently a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Flickr is constantly being tested and improved, while moving away from the image of being in "perpetual beta", which carries more of an implication of being an incomplete and unfinished product.

I think it's an interesting indication of the difference between the attitudes expressed through "traditional" desktop-based software applications and web applications. Just as writing styles for the web tend to be different to writing styles for print (taking into account users tendancy to scan online text rather than properly read it) the nature of web-based applications is inherently different to desktop-based applications.

Anything that a computer does is about information— the billions of switches that each represent a 1 or a 0 (depending on whether the switch is on or off) in turn represent a byte of information. When it comes to actually using a computer, that information could be part of the operating system that's running, the application that's in use, or the data that the application is using.

For a desktop application, that data is probably going to be some straightforward information- such as the text of the letter you're writing, the data in your spreadsheet, or the music that you're listening to. When a computer needs to communicate directly with you in some way, it tends to be to inform you about a problem, and is done so on a very impersonal level.

For a web application, the information is likely to be different. Because of the nature of the platform, it's much more likely that the information that's being dealt with is of a personal nature— you're most likely to be using the web to connect to someone in some way; a note from friends or family, photographs, or blogs and news articles that are relevant to you personally. Even though there isn't really a technological distinction between an error message from the computer under your desk and the error mesage from the computer in a server farm which might not even be on the same continent as you, there is definitely a perceived difference; because we tend to think of websites as existing out there in the ether, somewhere in cyberspace rather than on a simple computer somewhere, it doesn't feel like a computer that's telling you that something is wrong— it's the website. Whether that's Google, Flickr or somerandomnerd.com, it's still perceived that they are the source of the error message. As a result, the tendancy is for messages to be presented as though it were a personal message from the owners of the site, rather than a generic statement from a faceless computer.

Of course, there's more to it than simply the attitude towards the users; there are other factors that have affected this trend— back in the days where memory was measured in kilobytes rather than mega or gigabytes, unnecessary words like "please" or "sorry" were a luxury when every single message had to be stored somewhere. Error messages that were designed to only be seen or understood by developers and testing or support staff can be confusing, frustrating or simply annoying for the average user.

Still, if I were to log onto my PC and receive a message telling me that Windows Loves Me, I'm pretty sure that my reaction would be quite different. Flickr provides me with a service for free, with the choice of paying a small subscription for a premium service, saving me the hassle of hosting and backing up my own pictures. It also gives me inspiration for my own photos, and feedback for when I'm taking good pictures myself, while Windows provides me with little more an expensive operating system that doesn't do anything for me that my free Linux system doesn't do better, apart from occasionally crashing and losing all my work, which Windows does very well indeed. So if Windows told me that it loved me, I think I'd just laugh. But I guess now I come to think about it, maybe I love Flickr too.