Slashdot Mirror
A History of Flickr
Ant writes "USA Today has an interesting look back at how Flickr was born. From the article 'Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based online game start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing. "It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says. Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site -- now owned by Internet giant Yahoo! -- has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.'"
Flickr isn't really about the "image hosting" part of it - it's about the social aspect of it. Putting pictures in pools, commenting on people who take pictures with the same camera you do, finding photographers you like and can gain inspiration from, sharing photos with friends, and so on.
Gallery 2 is a great piece of image organizing and hosting software, though. It's just missing the social aspect that Flickr has.
...is just getting sickr and sickr. ;)
Flickr is a classic "flip it" company. A killer site with no workable revenue model as an independent company. It could not survive on its own (1GB/mo upload, no limit download? Hello, insane storage and bandwidth costs!).
It could only be successful as an offering from a company that had other ways to make money. Thus the Yahoo purchase.
You know, more and more I am reading news articles on slashdot that seem to be PR press releases more than they are "news". I mean, this is an interesting article and all, but it seems like shameless corporate patting yourself on the back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Henderson is the guy who was the original programmer, I believe.
In his own words: "Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from London, England, he currently works at Ludicorp R&D, makers of Flickr, in Vancouver, Canada and Sunnyvale, California. He's been working on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Offical website of the Internet"). Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communitites, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security. And writes biographies in the third person."
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