Well, looks like this just went public, so might as well announce it here as well.

After completing my tour of duty at Flickr, I’ll be joining Bitly as Vice President of Product this spring. Bitly has a fantastic small team of really smart folks, and I’m excited to go help build some new and exciting things there. Plus, I knew that for my next thing I needed to go somewhere with a wicked cool animal mascot (and the only thing that could beat a pufferfish in the department might be Octocat).

And yes, this means I’ll be moving back to NYC. On a personal note, seven years ago I swore I would soon return to New York when “temporarily” moving to the SF Bay Area. So it’s advantageous that my significant other decided that moving to the East Coast would be the best way for us to get a fresh start on a new life together. We’re currently alternating between looking forward to our coming adventure and being somewhat terrified! Thanks everyone for your kind words in the past 48 hours, it’s meant a lot to me. Onward!

The change

After nearly five years of awesome, I have decided to step away from my current role of Head of Product of Flickr, and resign from Yahoo! Inc.

I’ve had the privilege of developing some amazing things at Flickr. I’ve worked with many iterations of an amazing team. I accidentally invent a new holiday celebrated in 28 countries. I’ve had so many unbelievable opportunities while working on Flickr, it’s impossible to even begin to enumerate them.

Very early in my career at Flickr, I worked on the first version of our mobile website. Shortly after launch, while I was travelling on a business trip in the UK, I was waiting for my delayed flight home in Heathrow Airport, bored and lonely. I pulled up m.flickr.com on my Treo 650 and within seconds was looking at a photo my dogsitter had taken of my pooch minutes before, and was able to engage in a conversation in the comments with her. Nowadays, these sort of interactions seem old hat, but at the time I distinctly remember thinking: I helped build something that will change people’s lives for the better. This sentiment was important for me, and for the remainder of my career at Flickr, one of my fundamental underlying motivations in product development has been how will what we’re building enrich the lives of our members and change the way they communicate for the better? I’m proud to say that not only did I have the opportunity to build many things at Flickr that embrace this desire, but also that this sentiment permeates the entire team and I believe it will inform everything that they will continue to build in the future.

Nonetheless, the time has come for me to move on.

The good news

To steal and paraphrase from J. Allard’s excellent goodbye letter — “my life has been 95% Flickr and 5% other for quite some time, and I know the first step is to flip that ratio around.”

Against all odds (and in the oddest of places), I have met someone who having a future with is more important to me than any job could ever be. Leaving Flickr behind will allow me to focus more passionately on investing in a future with her.

The future of Flickr

Flickr now has a newly focused and developed product strategy to win in the photo sharing space. It’s there. It’s coherent. It’s consistent. I strongly believe it will work if executed on effectively. While I obviously can’t share metrics or specifics, in the things we’d begun rolling out in the past year, we’ve begun to see fantastic returns on our bets, in just the way we had been looking for.

Flickr is a small, scrappy team, working on challenges way larger than itself, and as a result it requires intense focus and effort. That sort of focus and effort is actually a good thing for any company, and the Flickr team has been able to step up to the challenge. As the photo sharing landscape evolves and becomes more complex, Flickr will require additional investment from Yahoo. I’ve done my best to advance this fight, and know those who come after me will continue to push that forward as well.

The short version? While I believe highly in the future of Flickr, my time to be leading the charge has passed. I need to pass on the torch to the next generation of Flickreenos, all of whom have a clear mission, sense of purpose, and the drive and talent to get it done. I know that they are up for the task.

What I’m most proud of

Hiring and mentoring some of the most amazingly smart and driven up-and-coming talent in the industry — I hope Flickr was (and will continue to be) as rewarding an experience for them as it has been for me.

Working on a team so committed to “doing the right thing” for our members. Whatever the outside perspective has been at time, and while public detractors (often pushing their own agendas) are certainly easy to find, I’ve never in my life met a group of people so strongly committed to this belief.

Finally, I’m proud to finally have the courage to step away, which anyone who has worked for many years on something they love knows, is an exceptionally difficult thing to do.

So what next?

I’m not going to announce my next thing here just yet, as I don’t want to muddle a post that’s meant to be about Flickr. Suffice to say, it is decided upon and exists, and I’ll share it sometime soon. In the meantime, I know that I’m walking away from one of the most important chapters of life, and hopefully into another.

Farewell.

Clearly, bug tracking systems need achievements! (Kellan and me causing trouble with FlickrHQ internal tools. My favorite is the one you get for fixing a bug after 2am.)

Coincidentally, a nice post today from Rands today on game-like incentives for software development, which inspired me to post this screenshot publicly.

(obvious apologies to 4sq for lifting their icons for parody while we make our own)

However, I have been posting various things that interest me fairly regularly on my tumblr page, which you very well may want to read if you are already following this blog.

Now that the cranky rant is over, I’ll try to actually be helpful. Here are some handy-dandy tips on Giving Good IM in a Workplace Environment:

1. Be specific: Context is valuable. Bad: “hey did u see http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f?” Good: “Hey, have you seen Bob Blowhard’s latest blog post on our product? (http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f). If not, you should check it out, it has some good commentary on the XYZ feature!”
2. Get to the point: If you are IM’ing because have something to ask, just ask. Don’t make “small talk” first, I’m going to be spending he entire time wondering what you’re working up to anyhow.
3. Exercise good timing: If my status message says “In a meeting,” then a message like “What time are you getting out?” may be appropriate. “What are your detailed thoughts on the implications of yesterday’s reorg on our marketplace strategy for Q3?” is not.
4. No reply necessary: Very uncommon, but people will love you if you do this. If you’re just passing on a piece of information and don’t need confirmation, let someone know they don’t need to reply, and save them a few seconds.
5. Quick queries only: My general guideline is that anything that will require someone to think for more than two seconds in order to answer is probably not appropriate for IM.

People have strong existing workflows to handling incoming email. Filters, folders, flags, et al. allow the recipient to delegate the incoming flow of information and respond to it in a way that works best for them. Instant messages “jump the queue” people have set up, so while it can be a powerful medium for lightweight communication, be considerate of helping keep people from becoming overloaded.

Do you have any other tips for dealing with IMs? Post them in the comments, perhaps I’ll compile a list of reader contributions.

…And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!

(with apologies to the Dove Evolution campaign)

Pinky and blue-y!

Lost Sensations, originally uploaded by | HD |.

Woo:

“Creative Director Jenny Lam expanded the search to Flickr and contacted people who took really interesting pictures, asking them, “So, how would you like one of your photos included among the default wallpapers in Windows Vista?” The Flickr artists were excited to be a part of Windows Vista (one of them by an astonishing coincidence happened to be a beta tester), and after the lawyers had their say—because nothing is complete without lawyers getting involved—Microsoft sent the photographers on a commissioned photo shoot.”

From The Old New Thing.

Too busy to post a proper announcement! Short version that doesn’t reveal anything sensitive: I’m thrilled to be taking my areas of research expertise and applying them towards strategic operations to help shape the rapidly changing media landscape. :-)

The abstract of said thesis:

This project analyzes the social uses of computer-mediated backchannel conversation in a shared physical environment, specifically the SIMS Backchannel—a virtual communication environment actively used by graduate students at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information.

In this study, we follow seventy backchannel participants over eighteen months of persistent usage in an academic environment, during which time over a quarter-million lines of conversation occurred. We employ a mixed methods approach including statistical analysis, an opinion survey, qualitative interviews with a number of participants, and field observation. We demonstrate and describe how the users of this communication backchannel have independently developed a variety of different usages for a novel communication environment, both in-class and outside. We descriptively categorize these usages and attempt to analyze the ways in which they are both highly dependent upon—and augment—the contextual relationship of co-presence.

The project was fascinating and I’m pleased with the results we obtained. Recently though, I’ve been excited about the potential for spontaneously emerging communication backchannels via Nintendo DS. So much so I used it as an excuse to buy a DS Lite as a personal “research expense.” (For those not in the know, the Nintendo DS is the new Gameboy that contains built-in WiFi for ad-hoc gaming sessions, and ships with a built in software program for textual and drawing communication.) Lately, I’ve been pulling the DS out in public places and scanning for active Pictochat sessions—the other night I successfully found one. A friend and I were at the movies and waiting through the boring trivia and candy advertisement pre-trailers, so we decided to mess around in Pictochat instead. Shortly thereafter, a “James” joined the chatroom, and proceeded to trade a few drawings back and forth with us. I stood up and scanned the theatre, and in the back, I could see James signaling back to me by waving his DS excitedly in the air, backlight aglow.

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