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.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
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.
About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them.
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.
Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.
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.
The poster child of Web 2.0 is Flickr.com. Personalization is a key piece of Web 2.0.
Campaign analysts say that Dean has produced the most innovative web site in this year's presidential race. I particularly like today's blog, which consisted of the sentence 'I hate myself,' typed four billion times. In Dean's case, this may be the first instance where the actually entity represented by the web site has crashed more often than the site did.
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.
The Pirate Bay has its own trackers. We have more info on the torrents since people upload them to the site and describe them.
I worked at a Web development shop and other start-ups and eventually started a project called Ludicorp, which built an online game. We soon ran out of money, and Flickr was the last-ditch effort to save the company. It quickly became a very unstoppable juggernaut.
One thing that gets missed a lot is that DonorsChoose is merely a place where teachers post wish lists. That doesn't do justice to the level of innovation that we see taking place on our site.
I do not have a Facebook page, and I do not chat on Twitter. I don't have a web site, even if there are people who have opened one in my name, complete with my photo.
It made a lot of sense to me that the music part of our site would work for filmmakers as well. They'll be able to upload clips. There will be a section where you can watch what they are doing. They'll tell where their screenings are. It took a lot longer than we wanted to because we were growing so fast.
The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.
We're not going the photography route. I think there is a real distinction between photos and images, and Flickr is for photos, and Instagram is for photos. You wouldn't put a filter on a meme; you'd put a filter on top of a photo that came from your camera.