Caterina Fake comes back from her travels and writes an incredibly thought-provoking post attempting to categorize the types of social sites out there, especially with respect to user growth metrics. In the post she argues for three categories: primarily social (MySpace, Facebook), rich content (Flickr, YouTube), and person to person (Y Photos, Ofoto) with each type having different kinds of production/consumption behavior.

I think Caterina's three categories are great as archetypes to use when thinking through the character of sites, or key product management questions, but at the risk of going against the current Web2 grain of "keeping it simple," I was left wondering why we can't have a little bit of everything. In fact, I think this little bit of everything is what makes Flickr such a great success.

It wasn't until we launched a got a whole influx of Flickr folks that I realized that the Flickr social community is very vibrant. I've heard from more than one user now that Flickr is in fact their adult version of Facebook. They use the "Your contacts" page as their browser's home page and wake up every morning to the sight of new photos within their social network. One user even described Flickr as a "communal photo blog" that was "the best way to stay in touch with people that I care about but who I don't talk to regularly." Does this sound MySpacey to anyone? In fact, I think it's way better because of the way in which the photos provide an entertaining substrate for the types of social activity that are otherwise context-less on sites like MySpace (more on that in a future post).

On to the person-to-person type of site: in a totally unofficial survey of some of the Flickr pro users I know, I was surprised to see how many of them use the site as one would use Ofoto or Yahoo Photos to share pictures on an access controlled basis with people in their tight social circle (family and close friends). In fact, when we first built the Flickr-Tabblo bridge, we failed to respect photo ACLs form Flickr which was a clear mistake we had to rush to fix given the number of folks who had a substantial number of private photos. If I had to guess, I bet that Flickr photos and privacy resemble a sort of upside-down glacier with 40% or so of the content buried under the privacy waterline for just this reason.

Here is my reason for pointing out how well Flickr does in the other two types Caterina describes– I think most people are multi-modal in their online behavior. Sometimes you want to act like one of Bradley's content generators putting together stuff with your "publisher" hat on, sometimes you want to share the photos of the BBQ with little care for composition or editing with people you know really want to see them, and there are even times when you'll use the site to find people who you might want to know. It is the sites that do the best job of providing enough flexibility to accommodate the different modes of behavior that end up doing the best in the end. Doing anything else (at least until you've got many many users showing you otherwise) seems like premature optimization to me.