Well Played, Flickr. Well Played

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it might also be a great way to find programmers.

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To catch unsuspecting programmers in the act of reading Flickr’s code for new ideas in design, Flickr inserted this snippet in their code’s header for all (geeks) to read.[/caption]

Since the web was designed to be open, it is well known by web devs that viewing source code on a nicely designed website is a great way to steal learn new tricks of great web design. If the new Flickr grabs your eye (and you’re geeky enough to want to peek under the hood) this is a great way to incent web-geeks to look closer at just joining them (Yahoo!) rather than trying to proverbially try to beat them at their game.

My concern? How do you know who has applied from reading the code!? I would give viewers a special link that tags the user as coming from the CODE not just the web in general… then you can parse the g33ks from the h@x0rs.