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A History of Flickr

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the your-roots-are-showing dept.

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.'"

7 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's today's version of the slide projector by permaculture · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yet the audience isn't trapped in a dark room. People only view Flickr if they want to.

    You can put up a photo and sent the URL to your friends. Unlike many other photo sharing sites the viewer doesn't have to join. By default every photo is viewable by anyone, though you can restrict this if you wish.

    Flickr is great for photographers. If you're a keen photographer working only in black and white, or in macro or whatever, you'll find photographers to share your work with. Every photo can be given descriptive tags, or joined to public photo groups. You can then search by tag, or browse groups. e.g.

    Every Flickr photo tagged with "londoneye":
        http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/londoneye/

    Group for photos of the City of London:
        http://www.flickr.com/groups/cityoflondon/

    Flickr is pretty good!

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  2. As a regular flickr users... by CrackedButter · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've come to realise that only 5% of the site is unsafe as well, mostly to do with porn not being porn but a man wearing suspenders over his legs and face squatting in disturbing poses.

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    Jonathanjk.com
  3. Image scraping by Danga · · Score: 3, Informative

    flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.

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  4. Subscriptions by lbft · · Score: 3, Informative

    Flickr also sells "pro account" subscriptions for the ability to upload more, no ads, etc. for $24.95 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/

    1. Re:Subscriptions by uf22 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Flickr is profitable on its own. Caterina confirmed so in this help forum. They have many pro subscribers and they show a couple of small ads on some pages when you haven't paid for a pro account. It seems that is enough. (disclaimer, I work for Y!)

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  5. Re:The Important Question by jbrw · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe the engineer in question is Cal Henderson. Last I heard, he'd just built this to help him get from his new SF home to his desk at Yahoo! HQ.

    He spends a fair chunk of time talking about how flickr was built, the notes of which are really interesting for anyone concerned about scaling out a web app.

  6. The name is kind of weird to me... by Mr.+Funky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

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