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.'"

Comments

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[CdBee]

Yahoo are making a right mess of things already, there's a real disprespect for original users who refuse to use a yahoo account, see this flickr group for some examples

We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?

[Animats]

Flickr is so 1999. We have clicks! We have eyeballs! We have users! We have traffic!

What's wrong with this picture? Where's the revenue? It's a free hosting service, and they boast about how many people take up their offer of free image hosting.

Does Flickr actually make money for Yahoo?

Re:We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?

[anat0010]

This is the only website I have ever paid a subscription for. Within one week of discovering it, I had reached for my credit card.
As they expand their pay-for services, such as printing and DVD back-up I've no doubt I will be happily paying for those too.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[JanneM]

For me flickr is a really good way to put up pictures I want to link to without having to put up my own server (which is an administrative hassle in any case, and impossible for me in my current circumstances). I don't have to worry about bandwidth limitations, backups, DNS issues, ISP/web hotels and so on.

What happened to the engineer

[rasgoo]

So, uh, whatever happened to original engineer who thought up the idea? Did he/she ever get anything out of Flickr?

The name is kind of weird to me...

[Mr. Funky]

The name is kind of weird to me because where I live (the Netherlands) 'Flickr' is a harsh synonym for 'Gay' and also is a synonym for 'Bad person'
Apart from the name it is a clever service, especially the tag-thing, like http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sluts/

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[Omestes]

Err... I think your missing the point. Taking a photo is about skill, and most real photographers despise photoshop, and only use it to ajust contrast, levels, etc... And then, only grudgingly.

One of my friends is a freelance photographer, and he will spend an hour and a half setting up a shot with his light meter, when most of what he is setting up for could be worked out in photoshop in ten minutes, but he would rather have the feeling of doing art, and not something that any slob could do in 10 minutes. He has skill, they don't.

I happen to agree. Photoshopped pictures does not equal art. Not saying photoshop isn't a valuable tool, I find it handy for what I do with it, collages and colorizations/photocorrection. But in art and professional photography it is best used sparingly.

And the parent is correct, even with photoshop, and filters, photoshop doesn't handle duotone as well as a decent B&W film. Mostly because you frame, and handle your stops/focus different. Photoshop is only as good as the original photo.