One of the patterns we’ve noticed while picking apart successful online communities is what we’re referring to as Instant Gratification. Instant gratification means not having to log in, sign up, post, search, make decisions, or try to figure out site structure in order to find meaningful content and experiences right away.

As Caterina Fake hits on in this interview over at Netmag:

Why has Flickr succeeded where similar sites have not?. “About 80 per cent of photos on Flickr are public: that level of social freedom wasn’t foreseen,” says Caterina. “When we started the company, there were dozens of other photosharing companies such as Shutterfly, but on those sites there was no such thing as a public photograph – it didn’t even exist as a concept – so the idea of something ‘public’ changed the whole idea of Flickr. By sharing images via tags, users are able to see stuff that’s going on all over the world – pictures of the London bombings and the Lebanese evacuation were up in minutes after the events.”

When I first discovered Flickr, it was because someone had sent me a link to one of their photos. I clicked on the link and guess what? I was able to see their beautiful image, and more of them. For that matter, I was able to view other images too. Before I knew it, I had poked through their party pics, I was onto a friend of a friend’s amazing road trip shots and I ventured out into the unknown, exploring amazing images from people I had never met and enjoying the glimpse into their lives that they had allowed me.

This sounds like a simple detail, but it’s surprising how often communities lock up their precious, precious content. Friends send me links to Facebook photos. I can’t see them unless I’ve created an account and logged in. I can’t share them with my friends and I certainly can’t start exploring or sharing on any level higher than avatars and handles.

Boring. I am most certainly not gratified.

In a lot of ways, this is simply about making your data and functionality open. If people can use it from the start, then they can understand it and hopefully start enjoying it. It’s also about maximizing the value of content within a system. Open content is searchable, usable and reusable to people and other sites in your ecosystem.

This stuff is useful in a lot of contexts, but happily for us, it’s particularly powerful in social networks. Since content tends to be tagged, linked, commented and sorted in connection to other users and content, if the system is open it creates unending pathways of LOLcats and indie rock bands for my experiencing pleasure.

On the other hand (and before I get out of hand as a cheerleader) Flickr’s main page could do a much better job of leveraging their community. Again, the most compelling thing in their community is the images that people share and the interactions they have. Instead of highlighting and making that accessible to new visitors, they focus on listing functions and more peripheral features.

Perfect—that is why we want to start articulating these types of interaction level patterns in this space. Compiling a set of practices like this will be a strong step towards making the communities that we strive to be a part of in the pixely downloady online world as healthy as their counterparts in the world of touchy smelly tasty real.

That would be most gratifying.