Flickr takes a Twitter cue; introduces suggested friends and Facebook contacts

Given that, from the start, Flickr was intended to be a social photo sharing platform, the latest move from the company comes as no surprise.

According to the Flickr blog, the site is introducing a People You May Know feature:

Suggestions are based on your contacts and the people they know. You can add contacts from the Find Your Friends page or right from the new module on your Flickr homepage. You can also designate them as a friend, family or contact right from the modules. If you need even more suggestions, just dismiss the ones that aren’t interesting to you and we’ll come up with some new ones! If you’re not comfortable with being suggested as a contact for others, we’ve also made it possible to hide yourself from suggestions.

Also added to the features is a new ability to pull in your Facebook friends. Now, instead of just Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, you can pull from the 500 million friends you might have on Facebook.

Interestingly, Flickr rolls out the new features right on the heels of a Compete report that shows the service slipping in its ranks. According to the report, Flickr lost almost 14 percent of its unique viewers during the month of September, though nothing is postulated as to why that happened.