Being Mark Cohen

These are the screens. The pics are refreshing hourly and so far the
biggest contributor has been iammrwong.

I think I enjoyed putting this together a little too much

We have three big LCD displays in our offices, in an area that used to be the reception when our company didn’t occupy the whole building. They sit off in one corner, sort-of-visible to people arriving and leaving the office. I’ve always thought that showing screenshots of our websites which are always updated was good for when it was a reception and clients would sit and wait there, but now that its in informal area it’s been a little ineffective. So I approached senior management and got permission to try a little experiment.

I’ve downloaded and modified the FlickrNetScreenSaver which is powered using a cool Flickr .net API wrapper called FlickrNet by Sam Judson. I have it set up to serve images approved by moderators (that was the concession to get it up and running) which are posted to a member-only flickr group.  I had to change the way it loads to stop it timing out with three displays as it pings back to wackylabs on load.  I also changed the cache time to one hour, as the default is one day.

What I’m wondering now though, is has it now lost it’s social edge. If it’s moderated then it’s forced to be moderate. And while I totally understand that we don’t want any HR nightmares on screen in the entry to our floor, does moderation remove the “social” from social media? Is a moderated forum really social media…

Either way, having the screens ticking over with photos we can send from team lunches or presentations or conferences feels like a way cool idea to me.  And for those who care to, we can use the same screensaver on our desktops to show the same stream in the office.  The experiment is really to see whether we have enough people to make it worth the effort.  I’m hoping so.