  The new social media sites - blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and Flickr, among
others - underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in
which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The
photo-sharing site Flickr, for example, allows users to upload photographs,
view photos created by others, comment on those photos, etc. As is common to
other social media sites, Flickr allows users to designate others as
``contacts'' and to track their activities in real time. The contacts (or
friends) lists form the social network backbone of social media sites. We claim
that these social networks facilitate new ways of interacting with information,
e.g., through what we call social browsing. The contacts interface on Flickr
enables users to see latest images submitted by their friends. Through an
extensive analysis of Flickr data, we show that social browsing through the
contacts' photo streams is one of the primary methods by which users find new
images on Flickr. This finding has implications for creating personalized
recommendation systems based on the user's declared contacts lists.
