New York — In what appears like a long overdue features, Flickr, at heart a social photo sharing service, on Thursday announced that it is finally rolling out a couple of features that should make finding friends easier based on your Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email and Facebook account, or at least people you know.
Flickr’s newly released feature “People You May Know,” as the name implies, which suggests mutual friends and contacts to add to your account, based on your current network. Also new is the possibility to import your Facebook contacts. This is a pretty powerful way to find mutual friends and connections.
“With millions of members on Flickr, there are bound to be a few you have missed along the way,” Flickr’s Denise Leung writes.
“So today, we are introducing People You May Know, a powerful new tool to help you find and connect with even more members of the Flickr community!,” she announced.
The newly introduced feature significantly bears striking resemblance to Facebook’s “People You May Know” tool, a small box with contact suggestions can be found on your Flickr home page. Suggestions can be turned off by clicking the ‘x‘ button to the right of the person’s photo.
“We think that Flickr is the best way to keep up with what is going on in your world and share your photos with the people you care about,” Leung, wrote in a blog post.
As Flickr explains in their blog post announcing the feature:
“Suggestions are based on your contacts and the people they know. You can add contacts from the Find Your Friends page or right from the new module on your Flickr homepage. You can also designate them as a friend, family or contact right from the modules. If you need even more suggestions, just dismiss the ones that are not interesting to you and we will come up with some new ones! If you do not want to be suggested to people, this feature uses the existing “Hide your profile from public searches” setting. So if you already choose to have your profile hidden from searches, it would not show up in this feature either.”
“We are also rolling out a new option to check your contact list on Facebook to see who also has an account on Flickr. Facebook joins our existing list of services including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail,” Flickr also said.
Also on Thursday, the company unleashed OpenID for Flickr, which will allow users to sign into the photo site using their Google account. “We are pleased to announce Google as our first partner, but stay tuned as we continue to add even more in the future,” Flickr said.