Displaying a Flickr badge within a MySpace profile was something that I thought would be an easy setup. MySpace after all allows almost anything to run on its systems, which is one of the hooks for getting new users on board…complete control. However, what they don’t offer, is the ability to run JavaScript, which is what powers said Flickr badge. I even tried setting up a page with a Flickr badge on my web server and calling using an iframe…no go. A bit frustrating.
Now obviously MySpace is not going to allow JavaScript to run on it’s site anytime soon, however, Flickr might be well served to whip up a MySpace friendly version of it’s badge code. Something that runs on DHTML perhaps, which is MySpace friendly, would be ideal. MySpace after all, does have over 18 million members, which DEFINITELY puts it at the level where other web service providers need to start thinking about developing items that are compatible with the MySpace system.
I know Flickr is part of Yahoo, and Yahoo is working to push Yahoo360 (a MySpace competitor of sorts), so a MySpace compatible version of the Flickr badge is probably not a high priority over there, but it’s something to think about. The crossover in those MySpace users that would use Flickr and vice versa, is probably fairly high…maybe in this case it is worth Yahoo playing to a competitor in one product in order to grow the user base of another.
UPDATED: Jimbo, who thinks he is soooo smart, pointed out that DHTML is really just Javascript + CSS, and if they don’t allow JavaScript (MySpace that is), then how can they allow DHTML? He is right. DHTML is JavaScript and CSS combined. My answer was…”I don’t know…but on MySpace, it does specify that DHTML is allowable, and JavaScript is not, which leads me to believe it is in fact possible. It could just be an error on MySpace though.”. My point is still the same. Flickr would be well served to come up with a MySpace compatible badge…
June 20th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
Tribe.net enables this. I know they don’t have the same adoption as Myspace, but they do make it easy.
June 20th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
that jimbo must be really smaht
July 27th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Go Sox!
November 2nd, 2005 at 5:01 pm
Please let me know if you reach a solution. I just tried this out today, failed, got frustrated, and found this page. HEY, putting in the blog template — that’s a good idea.
November 20th, 2005 at 10:19 pm
I have a service that uses static urls to dynamicaly redirect to the most recent or random image on a person’s flickr account. You can find out more at the scriptless flickr badge web page. And here are a couple myspace profiles that use it jimmy, nikola, Daniel, __Clint__
December 4th, 2005 at 6:24 am
Weston, how long does it take for the thumbnails to update? I uploaded 2 photos after I embedded your code on my Myspace profile and the thumbnails did not update.
December 11th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Currently it should update every 15 minutes, I set the cache to time out after 900 seconds at which time the cache is refreshed with the next request. But this may change. I keep the
February 7th, 2006 at 5:19 am
I guess you’ve found out by now, there is a way to insert javascript into myspace from the example of the “Sammy is my Hero” worm.
February 23rd, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Email me with the code you want inserted and i’ll try and work a solution.
July 3rd, 2006 at 9:43 am
The guys over at http://www.flashyoursite.com/ have been working on solving this. They have a simple slideshow that displays your public Flickr photos and are working on more features.
July 29th, 2006 at 5:12 am
I built a Flickr badge that will work with MySpace -(woo!) - you can go get it from here… http://www.mentalaxis.com/words/badgr
I’m adding new features to it so you will be able to customise things like the frame size, number of photos to display and other stuff…
Hope it flickr’s up your MySpace page
August 27th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Aaagh! I had hoped to find the answer to life, the universe and everything. Well - how to put my Flickr stream onto MySpace anyway. I guess it’s true that there are more questions than answers.
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Previous link should have read:
http://www.flashyourspace.com/
January 17th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Technically you don’t need javascript for your page to be considered DHTML. Using the :hover pseudo-class is considered to bridge into DHTML land because it is a way of making a page dynamic. I’ve seen people have hover classes that change visibility and display on DIV classes such that it appears they’re using javascript.
December 4th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
no. css-only is not dhtml.
dhtml is dynamic html, that is html that changes with code (javascript) using only css you can make things to show/hidde using the hover status, thats true, but the html still the same.
if you use javascript, you are changing the html code.
you could try to get the “javascript shell” and using the document.body.innerHTML to check the html on a dhtml every time something change and you will see a slightly different code, however on a css-only page you will see the same code