14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr, at heart a social photo sharing service, is rolling out a couple of features that should make finding friends, or at least people you know, on Flickr easier. A People You May Know is being introduced which, as the name implies, suggests users you may have a connection to. Also new is the possibility to import your Facebook contacts.
"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’re 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 feature is actually very similar to the tool Twitter introduced in the last few months.
The tool looks at your contacts and the friends they may have in common and makes suggestions based on that, on the likelihood that you may also know someone more than one of your contacts also know.
The suggestions can be seen on the Find Your Friends page, but they also show up on your homepage.
If you don't like the suggestions you can remove them and Flickr will provide others. If you don't want to be shown as a suggestion, you can use the “Hide your profile from public searches” option. If that is already enabled, you won't be suggested to other Flickr users.
"[W]e’re also introducing 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.
Users already had the option of importing their friends from the most popular email services on the web, which are also the most popular identity providers online, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, Facebook joins the ranks, suitable since it already has more than 500 million users.