Flickr Who is Looking?

• Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence pp. 184 - 190
• Main Author: van Zwol, Roelof
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 02.11.2007
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied computing > Document management and text processing > Document preparation > Multi > mixed media creation; Human-centered computing > Collaborative and social computing > Collaborative and social computing systems and tools; Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) > Interaction paradigms > Hypertext > hypermedia; Information systems > Information retrieval; Information systems > Information retrieval > Search engine architectures and scalability > Peer-to-peer retrieval; Information systems > Information storage systems > Storage architectures > Storage network architectures; Information systems > World Wide Web > Web searching and information discovery; Social and professional topics > Computing > technology policy > Government technology policy
• ISBN: 0769530265; 9780769530260
• DOI: 10.1109/WI.2007.60

This article presents a characterization of user behavior on Flickr, a popular on-line photo sharing service that allows users to store, search, sort and share their photos. Based on a sub-set of photos being uploaded during a 10 day window, we track the interest of users in those photos over a period of 50 days. In particular we investigate the user behavior on temporal, social, and spatial dimensions. Results show that the users are able to discover new photos within hours after being uploaded and that 50% of the photo views are generated within the first two days. The social networking behavior of users, and photo pooling are identified as the two major indicators related to a photo's popularity. Finally we show that the geographic distribution is more focussed around a geographic location for the infrequently viewed photos, than for the photos that attract a large number of views.