Last night Flickr announced direct sharing integration with Facebook. Sounds great, but as part of Yahoo’s attempt to stay relevant in the social space, it’s integrated with something called either Yahoo Updates or Yahoo Pulse (I can’t figure out if they’re the same thing or not) that adds one more layer of complexity to the privacy picture.
The premise seems straightforward: each time you upload a photo to Flickr, that photo is shared on your Facebook wall. Once you have things configured, that’s what happens.
How to Setup Flickr to Facebook Connectivity
First, if you’re already using the old Flickr to Facebook integration (which was, to put it nicely, flaky at best), you’ll want to disable that so you don’t end up double-posting. To disable the old system, on Facebook, go to your Profile. Click on Wall, then at the top find the Options link, then Settings, and if you see Flickr, click the little “X” to remove it.
Next go to the Sharing & Extending options of your Flickr account. Near the top you should see the blue button to connect with Facebook. When you click it, you’ll establish the Facebook connection, but you’ll also end up diving into a world of likely having to enable Yahoo Updates. What is Yahoo Updates? If you’re like me, you’d never heard of it previously. From what I can tell, Yahoo Updates is a social sharing system that spans Yahoo services. You’ll need to configure your Yahoo Updates to allow Flickr to share with Facebook (it’s a simple checkbox) and then, in theory, the connection will be established. At least, I think you’re configuring Yahoo Updates. That’s what it’s called in some places, but the page also brands itself as Yahoo Pulse. Pulse, Updates, who knows. It’s cute that Yahoo is trying to establish some sort of sharing platform, but really, are there many people where Yahoo is the center of their sharing world? I don’t know of any such people…
After enabling everything (and scanning Flickr’s Facebook FAQ to make sure I hadn’t missed something), I uploaded a photo to Flickr. About 10 minutes later, there it was on Facebook:
They’ve pulled the image title, description, and some tags with a link to view more of my photostream.
Go forth and re-integrate Flickr and Facebook.
It Works, But WTF?
Is this a good thing? Did Yahoo just spend a bunch of effort to fix something that wasn’t broken? Is Yahoo Pulse relevant? What if they’d done something truly interesting like allowed for cross-site photo comments instead of two silos? Flickr is great for getting comments from photographers, but what about comments from the wider population on Facebook?
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