🚀 Product Update: Following API & more

Our October Week 4 product update that we share internally with the Crew team, keeping them up to date on the product changes to Unsplash over the past week.

Following Feed API

Aaron Klaassen built out the first version of the Following feed API, which will power the new feed we’ll be launching soon to accompany the Home feed launched in the summer.

The first version of the Following feed aggregates the activities of your followers, including likes, new photos released, and collections, into a single, easy-to-consume, stream.

Lets back up though and answer: why are we building following into Unsplash?

Photo visibility

One of the most exciting and unique things about Unsplash is the instant virality a photo gets when it’s curated.

Some simple, back-of-the-envelope calculations show that photos on Unsplash are seen more times than any other photos in the world — including the biggest Instagram accounts or the front page of the New York Times.

As Unsplash has grown, balancing the virality of a few curated photos across the huge collection of photos being uploaded to Unsplash every day, has been a major challenge. To this day, we’ve successfully been able to amplify the Unsplash-effect to a large number of photos, as can be seen by comparing a good quality photo on Unsplash vs a good quality photo on other photo platforms like Flickr, VSCO, and 500px.

However, in the future, we don’t think our current approach will necessarily scale.

We’re aiming to fix that by balancing the big push on curated collections with the new, algorithmic Home feed.

With the algorithmic Home feed, we’re working on showing unique feeds to each of the millions of Unsplash users, based on many indicators of quality. Essentially, it’s a way to maximize exposure across great photos, regardless of the photographer’s following, or when the photo was released.

Community

Unsplash is a huge community of millions of creatives.

Every day they perform hundreds of thousands of activities on Unsplash, from releasing amazing new photos to collecting and rating photos, to uploading their remixes to Made with Unsplash.

Looking at the current version of Unsplash, all of that activity is essentially hidden. The main pages of the site only update when we tell them to update (whatup Unsplash Community team!), which means that Unsplash is a largely static site.

Following users and surfacing their actions was an obvious choice to add more dynamism to the site, but for a long time, we held off on the idea because we felt that the purpose wasn’t necessarily clear.

What we realized recently was that following is an essential way for people to create, express, and maintain relationships. Since we believe Unsplash is, more than anything, a community of creatives, relationships are critical to Unsplash’s success as a community.

The Following feed is one of the ways we plan to make the site more dynamic and community-oriented, but we’ve got a lot of other ideas there that we’ll be sharing soon.

• Timothy released a new data endpoint for collecting and processing realtime events. It’s part of a new architecture for our data pipeline that is composed of realtime and batch processing. We’ll be putting this to use first with new metrics for downloads, as we migrate off of our legacy system.
• Joshua Comeau (👋) added the ability to perform an action (like or collect) while logging in and returning to the same page
• Naoufal Kadhom added the ability for users to switch experiments via a URL, which lets our team easily switch between experiments and new features.
• As part of our SEO effort, Naoufal and I polished up our sitemaps and turned re-generating them into a daily job that pings search engines.
• Kirill Zakharov and Naoufal added social sharing buttons to collections:

• the team collectively closed 21 issues, bringing our total issue count across all of our repos down to just 13

TTU: 5.95M minutes (+7.76% over the same week a month ago)