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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.'"

3 of 88 comments (clear)

  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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  2. 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.

  3. 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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