I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
Flickr was designed partly to market itself. There are a lot features, in place early on, that let people take their photo, upload it to Flickr and post them elsewhere, on their own Web site or their blog, which meant a lot of incoming links.
There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.
You do a movie. However long it lasts, it begins and it ends in a relatively short period of time. In a given period of time, let's say a year, you can have three, four, or five different experiences which is exciting.
I remember working with a guy named Andrew Braccia at Yahoo, and Yahoo was the company that bought Flickr. Everyone on his team was hard working and reliable, did what they said they were going to do, on top of everything, and seemed to be operating at this level of productivity and effectiveness that I found difficult to manage to.
Theres no such thing as Flickr Pro because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, theres no such thing, really, as professional photographers when theres everything thats professional photographers. Certainly theres varying levels of skills but we didnt want to have a Flickr Pro anymore. We wanted everyone to have professional quality photo space and sharing.
One thing I've learned from my short time trying to be a farmer is that our farmers have to be the bravest, most optimistic people in the world. To go back to the land year after year, after what nature throws at them and the world economy does to their income, takes a special kind of person.
I'm very grateful and proud of the progress Yahoo! has made over the past year. When I took the position as chairman, I told the board that my intention was to serve for one year in order to help Yahoo! during a critical time of transformation.
I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007.
Menshn is a play on the word mention, and in the U.S. that's how it'll be perceived. Like Tumblr or Flickr. People in the U.K. thought that I'd named it after myself.
I'm in awe of people out there who deal with Alzheimer's, because they have to deal with death 10 times over, year after year.
The vision that we laid out in 2004 was designed, at best, for a 10-year period. And it was pretty clear that the vision that we laid out in 2004 by the time we arrived in 2010-11 was not working anymore.
When I came back from the military and completed a 4-year degree in 2 1/2 years, I developed the extraordinary habits needed to get a lot done in a very short period of time!
I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.
In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back.
From now until the end of the year I would like to eke out one victory, that's my short term aim. I am sure I can be competitive in 2004. Tennis is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.