Flickr And MySpace

June 20, 2005 in Uncategorized with 15 Comments

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…

  • http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media Peter Caputa

    Tribe.net enables this. I know they don’t have the same adoption as Myspace, but they do make it easy.

  • boobs mcflavor

    that jimbo must be really smaht

  • http://FortDrastic.com FortDrastic

    Go Sox!

  • http://www.myspace.com/clintjcl ClintJCL

    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. :)

  • http://theducky.com Weston Renoud

    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__

  • http://www.eliastahan.com Elias

    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.

  • http://theducky.com Weston Renoud

    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

  • Johnny

    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.

  • http://krustie.com Dan

    Email me with the code you want inserted and i’ll try and work a solution.

  • http://www.flashyoursite.com/ Marc

    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.

  • http://www.mentalaxis.com/words/badgr Jason

    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

  • http://www.british-in-germany.de Your Teacher

    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.

  • http://www.flashyourspace.com/ Marc

    Previous link should have read:

    http://www.flashyourspace.com/

  • http://www.myspace.com/joiseymike Joisey Mike

    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.

  • chrisl

    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