Flickrball is a six-degrees-of-separation scavenger-hunt game, using Flickr thumbnails and tags for clues. To play:
- Note the starting and ending tags listed at the top of the page. The ending tag is your goal. What's on the page right now is a set of 49 thumbnails, all of which have your starting tag. Mouse around until you find a thumbnail you think might have a tag that leads you closer to your goal, and click it to zoom in.
- When you zoom in on a thumbnail, you'll see its tags. If you see a likely-looking tag, click it for a new set of thumbnails. If you get stuck, you can back up by clicking any of the tags you've already chosen.
- Clicking the zoomed-in image will open the photographer's Flickr page in a separate window; these clicks don't count towards your total, so enjoy. Once you reach your goal, your score is the total number of clicks you made. (Lower is better.)
- For reasons of tradition, the beta-test version of Flickrball starts with "kevin" and ends with "bacon." If you hate this idea, feel free to substitute your own start and end tags like cat » dog, alpha » omega, soup » nuts, or whatever.
- Please be patient while it loads! Flickrball is a test of a) my bandwidth and b) your Internet karma. Clicking, reloading, and otherwise thrashing at the page while it's loading won't do anything to speed it up.
How It Works
Through the manifold miracles of Javascript, XMLHTTPRequest, PHP, and Flickr's lovely exposed APIs, we can request sets of thumbnails with specific tags, and sets of tags from specific images. Most of the guts of the thing are right here in the source code; two small bits of PHP pull down XML from Flickr, massage it nicely, and supply lists of images and tags. (Yes, documentation and source code will be along soon.)
The nifty rolling-ball interface was inspired by one of Gerrard Ferrandez's many uber-cool demos at dhteumeuleu.com.
Caveats and Gotchas
Flickrball looks and acts differently on different browsers. Sorry about that; I'm still working on it. (Compatibility check: so far Flickrball seems to work on IE6+ and Firefox on WinXP, and Safari and Firefox on OSX. Opera ... not so much.)
Blank thumbnails show up occasionally. I have no idea why; suggestions would be gratefully accepted.
There's a distressing lack of feedback while things are loading. Keep an eye on your status bar; when it settles down, you're probably ready to rock.
Sometimes the zoomed-in image seems to load under the currently-displayed one. If this happens, wiggle the scrollbar gently and it will pop into place.
Directions for Future Development
Presently I am working on all the bugs listed above, plus:
- a nicer way to specify your starting and ending tags
- a high-score list, and a way to save the trail of thumbnails you used
- some way to get a fresh set of thumbnails with tag X, in case the ones you have are all duds
Acknowledgements, and a Dedication
Thanks to Mike Lee, Scott Schiller, Gina Groom, Leslie Sommer, Jason Schupp, Hedger Wang, Nate Koechley, Jimmy Byrum, Barney Mok, and Dave Balmer, for keeping me on my game.
Special thanks (again) to Gina Groom, who pointed out that I was working on a game, not a thumbnail browser.
Flickrball is respectfully dedicated to the back-end engineers who made the whole Web-Two-Point-Oh-Isn't-That-Cool phenomenon come to life. Without their hard work and constant vigilance, it simply wouldn't be possible. Building pretty pages is easy and glamorous ... balancing the load, pushing the build, and keeping the damn database up 24/7 is hard. Thanks, folks; please keep up the good work.
If You've Read This Far
Please come drop me a line in the Mindsack and tell me how you liked Flickrball. It's always great to hear from one's audience; analyzing traffic logs works, but it's a thin sort of applause. :)