Contacts on Flickr

Spirit of the staircase 2 (l'esprit d'escalier), originally uploaded by AnthonyGibbons.

I'm pretty choosy about my contacts on Flckr. Increasingly so, because you get a lot of dross appearing in your contact pictures otherwise, but I still have shedloads of people in my contacts section. 356 as of this evening. Note: I have nowhere near as many Facebook Friends and even fewer (I typed less originally then corrected myself) actual friends (thank heavens).

But on Flickr I have 356 contacts.

Some of these have billions of people attached to them as contacts. As far as I can see it literally everyone who "contacts" them will get the compliment returned.

In the most positive light this is very polite.

In a less positive light it suggests that these users are very self-promotional. If that is truly a negative, I don't know. I use Flickr to get people to look at my work, which is self promotional, they're just taking it to an extreme I wouldn't consider. I can call it sharing as much as I like, but like many users I'd be pretty pleased if I sold some prints as a result of my Flickr activity, so I know it does go beyond that for me.

The real problem with this for me is that I genuinely enjoy looking at some of the photographs from other users, and if you add everyone then you never see anything you like. Ten billion photos of badly exposed cats, or poorly cropped puddles; I just don't need it. I do have pictures of puddles in my favs, and also the rare shot of a cat (which has to be really good to get there - if you've got a cat, or any domesticated creature, in my favs, feel very pleased with yourself - top marks), but I like the contacts section to contain, well at least 20% of stuff I can enjoy, and maybe 1% I can really love, and too many contacts weights the odds in favour of ugly cats.

For the first time in ages though, I checked my contacts notifications. If someone adds me as a contact I will always, but always, give their photostream a look. First page only sometimes, or a couple of pages if I quite like their work, but am not sure if they will regularly get near that 20%. It's a bit choosy and particular, but so am I.

Sometimes I check out the profile, but not that often. Maybe if I really like their work. Today though I checked someone out and noticed that I was one of about 20 contacts.

Which impressed me. I mean that shifts the whole self-promotion thing the other way. How cool to only have the people that you like a lot to appear in your contacts.

Of course I am probably reading far too much into this. Most likely a casual user, as I used to notice that most people had shedloads of contacts on Flickr. So as I went through checking out the people who'd added me, I looked at their contact number numbers too, and was suitably impressed to discover that most of those who'd added me had relatively low nos.

What does this mean? I honestly don't know, but I've recently had a spell of using Flickr less than I would like, and taking photos less too, life being what happens whilst I'm busy making other plans to paraphrase John Lennon, and I've been trying to work out why I was still getting a steady stream of hits. Not from blogs or external sites so much, but from the internal Flickr hits and this is my only explanation.

So, I'm flattered potentially, even though my logic may be off and I may well be deluding myself terribly (hey I'm writing a blog read by almost no-one though - so self-delusion is clearly part of my armoury) but if I am right, I do feel slightly envious of their lovely vanilla dross-free contacts list.

Maybe I'll go thorough my contacts and do a little pruning of numbers myself. Only a few, here and there, and if you're left at the end it must mean I really like your work. Maybe.

I maybe selling myself short though. I officially have one "follower" on the blog. Woo.