This hilarious photograph by darkmatter is my favourite Flickr-lover shot of all time (although I recommend you check out the Flickr Fan Art Pool for some great ones).
Some of the users go totally ga-ga over Flickr. Many of their users are at least moderately in love with the service. Most find it quite useful and life-enhancing. It continues to grow at a nice rate (sometimes with spurts, but mostly steady) and has become a total zeitgeist, appearing in almost every magazine around the world that talks about community, technology and things that inspire.
This is a website. A website. A mere tool!
But is it?
Flickr has mojo. They have alot of it. In fact, the site oozes it…but it isn’t really the layout or much of anything to do with the programming…that’s just a part of it. It’s everything that goes into it. When I started to use Flickr in early 2005, I could feel the “soul” of the site instantly.
The reason I bring this up right now is that I’m working on some solid examples for my upcoming presentations at the Future of Web Apps and ETech as well as the fact that Mick brought it up on the Tangler blog.
He asks:
As a up and coming company with more then a dash of community about it, I’m interested for Tangler’s sake in what people think are the reasons that Flickr won.
I mean, there were a lot of photo sharing sites, or at least online photo storage sites around when Flickr got started, but it carved a big niche and was successful as a startup, selling to Yahoo.
Well, I would say, first off that ‘winning’ is a pretty subjective term. But, for argument’s sake, let’s say they “won”. I’ve personally spoken with many of the people who took Flickr from A Game Neverending (GNE) to Flickr to it’s acquisition and who are still working on it at Yahoo!, and there doesn’t seem to be one cogent “story” or “reason” for their success. [Really, it's kind of what I'm referring to when I am talking about the diversity of experience with "community".]
That’s okay, though. Everyone experienced the growth from a different perspective, but I believe that they all understand that a passionate team, working together towards a similar Higher Purpose, does what it does to get wherever it is that team is going. Furthermore, I conjecture that each of them understand that all of these elements working together, combined with the environmental factors they couldn’t control contributed towards that success.
Scientists know that if the slightest change to the environment of a petrie dish can dramatically change the outcome of an experiment. So, even if Tangler or any other startup out there knew the EXACT steps Flickr took and repeated nearly every single element that went into their success, the results would probably dramatically different because, well (to name a few): the environment is drastically different, they have a totally different team of people, the product is different (and in Zooomr’s case, the product is almost exactly the same, but it’s not…[yes, this is a subjective viewpoint - I've removed the Alexa reference because I don't believe in pure stats as indicators anyway]), the intentions are different (”winning” didn’t seem to be their driving purpose), etc.
But even so, the Flickr story is pretty darned inspirational and I believe that they did do and continue to do some really inspirational, fantastic things that we can all learn from. In fact, if everyone in the world could be just a little more like the people behind Flickr, the world would be a much better place.
So, I made a little image map on Flickr that maps out some ‘milestones’ from their success that I would love others to add to as well as tag the way you want (and, please, tell me if there are other versions of this around - I suck at searching for these things), and I wrote a little synapses in the comment section of the Tangler blog that got eaten up (luckily I typed it in textmate first) that went like this:
Hi Mick,
There isn’t one reason why Flickr ‘won’ and it sure as heck wouldn’t happen again, even if you tried to recreate, but here are some things they did right:
1. They didn’t go into it thinking, “Let’s win” They started GNE because they were passionate about online gaming. Check out their ABOUT page for Ludicorp.
2. They were already involved in many online gaming communities, so they already had tonnes of connections to get feedback.
3. When Flickr started getting more popular amongst their users, they paid attention and shifted focus…a little in the beginning, more as it picked up. Check out their news page for the progression from GNE to Flickr.
4. As Judson indicates above, they were revolutionary and first…but it was only a tiny tweak. There were tons of photo storage sites on line, but none that said, “Screw it” to privacy and made it all about sharing your photos with the world and connecting to others…even strangers through it.
They didn’t try to change everything at once…just simple, slight tweaks to teach people a new paradigm.
5. They were excited about every new community member, connecting them to one another. The legend reads that when a new member signed up and started uploading their photos, Caterina would say, “Welcome to Flickr! I noticed you really enjoy nature photography. You should really meet this person over here who does too.”
6. They took risks and tried things that nobody else was doing. Like tagging. They knew Josh at del.icio.us and tagging seemed like a great way to structure data, so they gave it a whirl early on…not when it became ‘cool’.
7. They helped people kick ass. They helped amateur photographers strut their stuff by making the photos front and center. They helped people who enjoyed photography by making great, revolutionary navigation (tags, interestingness, etc.). They helped people who liked to share their ’social shots’ connect with their friends who were doing the same (groups, tags, rss, friending, etc.).
8. They did this over a long period of time, not in a couple of months, but from 2002 to 2006 (Flickr from 2004).
9. They are still as passionate today as they were when they were starving programmers in their little space in Vancouver.
Personally, I think it is a scary thing to try and duplicate ’success’. It’s what all of those formulaic business books do and they perpetuate a great deal of mediocre (and sometimes dangerous) thinking.
We certainly can learn from people, like when Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, “You make me want to be a better person,” in As Good as it Gets. We need to learn to take the time and care to carve our own successes (continuing to redefine whatever success means). And, if we lack the instincts we need to get there, we need to start working on those first.
And the first step to that is to really connect to others, looking beyond our own little world we live in. It helps us see the reflections of ourselves in it, which will help us understand our place within the world, which will lead to us being more in touch with our instincts.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart! - Metropolis.
View Tara Hunt's profile
27 Comments
Did you do your homework on your comparison of Flickr and Zooomr? There are a number of significant differences that make Zooomr better, such as portals, zooomrtations, people tags (a HUGE deal), and the list goes on and on. Let’s not forget that out of the two, Zooomr was the first to introduce geotagging. Zooomr is still Beta, and has been built by one young guy (that alone makes it a fantastic achievement) while Flickr is Gamma and has had the benefit of the Yahoo dollars and manpower to push it along in recent development. Plus, you’re making a traffic comparison between an up and coming site like Zooomr (with nary a million photos under its belt) with the 800-pound gorilla that is Flickr. That’s just plain mean. And to say that Zooomr won’t make it, that’s just asinine. Do you know the future? How do you know how Zooomr’s going to fare? They’re not burning through their capital, they’re keeping the operations as slimmed down as possible by spending every dime on hardware and bandwidth, and building up gradually through word of mouth and good vibes in the press. Plus, Mark III, the third version of Zooomr’s coming out, and it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to introduce (among other things), Marketplace, which will allow photographers to sell their work. Does Flickr have that? Nope. Instead, they have a cheesy option to sell low-res cameraphone shots of special events. That’s pathetic, and frankly, so are your comments about Zooomr. It’s not nice to punch under the belt…
Cheers Tara, that’s the sort of banter I was after.
My husband and I were having a conversation about the ubiquity of Flickr over dinner tonight and we came to the following conclusion: Flickr=Kleenex. There may be others out there with snazzier technology or tons of buzz and cash behind it, but it was in the right place at the right time and captured the collective consciousness, moving it from mere “facial tissue” to “kleenex.” And that’s pretty hard to beat.
Not coincidentally, we’re aiming for Kleenex status ourselves in the not-too-distant future. But only our customers will be able to decide if we’re worthy in the end.
Mick: awesome
Amie: absolutely
Raoul: you might want to check your koolaid level there, dude. I didn’t say anything about Zooomr…I just pointed to the difference in growth even with a similar…and, as you say, more feature-rich product…And by this time in Flickr life (PRE Yahoo), Flickr had many more users.
Hey…and when did this become about Zooomr? I swear, get your own damned brand. It’s super pathetic to go around, living in the shadows of another brand. If y’all spent more time being the best of who you are and not trying to be better than someone else, you may actually start to matter.Redacted. It was said in ‘irritation’ and not very nice.
I think tagging, the ease of putting photos on other websites, and being able to upload large images were a few of the reasons flickr has done so well.
There were other sites like textamerica and buzznet which allowed people to display photos publically before flickr did.
But neither innovated fast enough though they eventually added flickr-like features (textamerica alienated most of their users last year both by killing free accounts and how they did it).
For another (graphical) view on the growth of Flickr, you might like to take a look at my recent chart of number of images on the Flickr service over time:
http://www.zmarties.com/picasa/blog/2006/12/how-many-photos-does-flickr-host.html
Tara,
Raoul’s comment was made because he felt that you were attacking Zooomr. When you linked to a graph comparing Flickr and Zooomr you made a snide comment about Flickr having purer “intentions” (your word) and made a statement that Zooomr and Flickr are almost the “exact same thing.”
The truth of the matter is that you have spent zero time on Zooomr and are entirely unfamiliar with what we are and who are users are.
To start with, most of our users are outside of the U.S. This is because we are localized in over 17 different languages. In your English-centric world Flickr and Zooomr may be “the exact same thing,” but to someone who doesn’t speak English — Yes Tara, there are actually people in Taiwan (our single largest region for traffic) who do not speak English — for these people, having a site in their native language is an important feature and not “the exact same thing that Flickr” at all.
Portals, trackbacks, peopletags, lightbox, friends of friends, not to mention our plans for helping photographers access closed markets (stock photography), more language support, and many other things that we are working on as I write this — the list goes on.
Oh yeah, Zooomr supports openid where Flickr doesn’t. In fact, Zooomr is one of the only sites out there that is using OpenID at present for 100% of our user logons. I suppose that’s another one of those stupid features where we’re “exactly like Flickr.”
Your attempt to make Zooomr look insignificant by plotting us, a two man team that is less than a year old, on a graph against a mature industry leader owned by a multi-billion-dollar company is disingenious.
You know, three months ago when Chris Messina IM’d me and said ‘hey man, you really should check out Magnolia, we’re consulting for the company,’ I didn’t bash them for daring to take on delicious. I actually spent the time joining the site and checking it out and eventually blogging about them because I liked it and Chris is someone that I respect. I didn’t just blindly say, “well, my god, how dare they take on delicious.”
But just for sake of comparison I’ll give you your own Flickr vs. Zooomr graph back, but this time comparing Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us. Oh and isn’t it the exact same thing how Magnolia even uses dots in their name like delicious does. I’m sure their “intentions” are bad.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=http%3A%2F%2Fma.gnolia.com%2F&site1=zooomr.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&range=1y&size=Large&y=r&z=3&url=flickr.com&x=0&y=0
Yes, that graph tells me a lot doesn’t it. I suppose that graph just tells me how badly magnolia sucks — well, unless the company happens to be hiring you in which that case they become, “Our fabulous client, Ma.gnolia - which I know we go on about, but they just make us so darned proud (a 3-person 4-person team that implements fast and correctly and really, really gives a darn about community)” (your words).
Well, we give a damn about our community too. And Raoul calling you out isn’t about him drinking koolaid, as you rudely dismiss him — his reaction is because as a user of Zooomr he is passionate because we care about our users Tara. Because even though before Zooomr I never knew Raoul, today he has my cell phone number and has direct access to us, the guys building the site. We appreciate him and his contributions to “our” community.
If you want to say you love Flickr do it all day long. I say it all the time myself and geniounely mean it. I use Flickr every single day and love it for what it is, but it’s not Zooomr. And for you to make backhanded snide comments attacking our company and dismissing one of our photographers who calls you out on it just shows how biased you are.
I used to respect what you had to say and had you on both my blogroll and in my RSS reader. Consider yourself dropped from both.
Thomas Hawk
CEO, Zooomr Inc.
Oops, I posted the wrong Alexa graph — it’s more accurate for comparing two small companies that are both growing.
Instead, here’s your graph comparing ma.gnolia with de.lico.us — a graph that looks remarkably similar to the graph you posted comparing Zooomr with Flickr.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=http%3A%2F%2Fma.gnolia.com%2F&site1=del.ico.us&site2=&site3=&site4=&range=1y&size=Large&y=r&z=3&url=del.icio.us&x=0&y=0
Thomas
Thomas - this is ridiculous. Stop being a bully.
Tara, what is ridiculous is your criticizing Zooomr’s product as “almost exactly the same” as Flickr and implying that our intentions are bad — while at the same time referring to Ma.gnolia, another site which offers a similar service to another popular Yahoo based social site as:
“Our fabulous client, Ma.gnolia - which I know we go on about, but they just make us so darned proud (a 3-person 4-person team that implements fast and correctly and really, really gives a darn about community”
How is Ma.gnolia offering a competing bookmarking service any different than our offering a competing photo sharing site?
Oh, yeah, they pay you and we don’t. It’s hypocritical and your brush off that my comments are “ridiculous” are insulting.
Rather than logically address the inconsistencies in your comments you’d rather brush them off as illegitimate, ridiculous and assert that I’m bullying you.
You might want to check your koolaid level there dude.
I have a couple of other things I’d suggest as possible success factors for Flickr.
1. Hooked onto the social network trend early, and treated image sharing as a social activity.
2. _Great_ and I mean _great_ user interface. Where other image sharing sites made you do dumb things like download and install a custom application, Flickr had a good AFLAXian interface that fit nicely under the hand and made using the browser to manage photos easy. It also degrades well to an almost-as-featureful AJAX interface.
3. Really open process. Users are welcome to comment on UI and functionality, and those comments are acted upon. It’s still not unlikely that posts to the forums will get input from Flickr founders or staff.
4. Mobile interface. Flickr made it pretty easy to upload photos from a phone just as cameraphones were getting some traction in North America.
5. API. By providing an API that third-party developers could use, they got great Web mashups and nice desktop image-management apps (with minimal developer time invested). It’s a great thing when your community is so passionate about your service that they spend their free time writing software to access it. If they do, be ready for them!
6. Using Creative Commons licenses. Flickr aligned itself with the CC movement and thus further embedded itself into the camp of the Good Guys. Good Guys stick together and help each other out.
Neat and interesting post, Tara.
-Evan
Thomas…stop it. You are a grown man and you are letting your insecurities get the best of you.
To make it clear:
1. I didn’t imply that Zooomr has ‘bad intentions’ - I was actually refering to Tangler, another client, in their question of ‘how to win’ - which isn’t a ‘bad intention’, it is just different. If you re-read the paragraph within context, you will see this. I think nearly anyone would see this.
2. I didn’t mention Ma.gnolia in this post at all. Yes, I think what they are doing is great, but they are not at odds with del.icio.us. In fact, when Kevin Smokler asked Larry in front of an audience of people why anyone should switch from Del.icio.us, Larry replied, “They shouldn’t” He started ma.gnolia because he wanted to organize his bookmarks in groups in an aesthetically pleasing environment. Not because he wanted to be better than del.icio.us. Hell, it took them a while to add the bookmark import, which was requested by their members. Ma.gnolia isn’t aggressive and you won’t find them following posts on del.icio.us all over the web. I don’t know why Chris pitched you. I don’t think that is what he would do. I disagree with that tactic and I think he does too…
3. I haven’t posted anything overtly negative about Zooomr. I was merely demonstrating how a similar product launched today doesn’t have the same zeitgeist almost a year later that Flickr had after a year. It doesn’t. It does have Kristopher the wunderkind. It does have Raoul’s who go around defending the company. Cool. That’s great. You are doing something right. I know Zooomr is 100x more feature-rich than Flickr. Personally, it’s not my bag. When people publish books about you, you appear in museums, you are named Time’s people of the year for the heart and soul you bring the community, etc. I will cheer for you.
What I don’t like is being attacked and threatened on my blog. That’s uncool.
Oh, and please don’t take my comments about Magnolia as a criticism in any way as to what they are up to. My point is more to address the inconsistencies in how you blog about companies depending on whether they pay you or not.
Actually I really like Magnolia a lot, I find it a terrific site for managing my bookmarks and like the fact that they support OpenID… unlike Delicious.
I am biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased. We are human beings.
I blog positively about companies I like. If I use a service and it delights me, I blog about it. I am paid by alot of companies that I don’t blog about at all…why? Because they don’t delight me…yet. We are working on it.
Ma.gnolia, as you recognize, does alot of things right. I heart Larry and Todd. They are some of the nicest people I know. Larry doesn’t want to beat anyone. In fact, one of the reasons I heart Larry is because he once said to me, “I just want to make enough money to be able to run my servers and pay Todd and one other full-time developer. I don’t want to be the next Yahoo! or Google. I would rather create something remarkable instead of big. That is success to me.”
That was so refreshing to me. And you know, I haven’t blogged about how Ma.gnolia is the most feature rich amazing application ever. I’ve blogged about how I love Larry’s attitude. Ma.gnolia pays us, yes, but not to lie. They pay us to help them be better. The fact that we love them covers afterwards…despite the monetary exchange.
And by this time in Flickr life (PRE Yahoo), Flickr had many more users.
In Dec. of 2003 flickr uploaded their 75th photo. They were just starting out in photosharing. On September 29th, almost 10 months later one of their users uploaded their 634,260th photo.
Zooomr really didn’t get started as something more than what Kristopher was hacking on until April of last year. I joined the company in mid June of last year. And here we are about 7 months later with our user alden uploading the 673,940th photo to Zooomr.
http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/30641@Z01/673940
This is public information as both Zooomr and Flickr use a numbering system with their photos uploaded that is reflected in a photo’s url.
Since both Flickr user data and Zooomr user data are not public and are private information I’d be interested what you were basing your claim of, “And by this time in Flickr life (PRE Yahoo), Flickr had many more users.”
Making comments like “It’s super pathetic to go around, living in the shadows of another brand.” And in your paragraph about “intentions” it’s interesting how Tangler isn’t mentioned anywhere but Zooomr and a ridiculous link comparing our traffic to Zooomr is.
Maybe the be all, end all of it for you is having Flickr like traffic and appearing “in museums,” and being “named Time’s people of the year.” But that’s not how we choose to judge our success or failure. We will be successful if users like Raoul continue to love and enjoy the service. We will be successful if we can translate into even more languages beyond the 17 that we are already in and bring more beautiful photography to the entire world. We will be successful if we find a way for hard working photographers to access stock photography markets that have been closed to them in the past.
And if we never make it on the cover of time and never have you cheer for us we won’t lose any sleep over this fact.
I have no problem with you blogging about sites that delight you. But when you overtly attack another small site and our users it pisses me off.
And you say I threatened you? How did I threaten you? I read your incredibly biased and misleading comments about a company that I’m passionate about and love and I saw you belittle and rudely dismiss someone who is a cherished member of our community and I called you out on it.
By the way have you checked out the Alexa graph lately comparing Citizen Agency with Google? Unbelievable really.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=citizenagency.com&site1=google.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=500&range=6m&size=Medium&url=citizenagency.com
Tara, thank you for redacting those comments that you made earlier about Zooomr. I’m sorry if I got especially heated over all of this, but when Kristopher and I are working 20 hour days and pouring our heart and soul into Zooomr and the community that we love, it just hit me especially hard. I’ve only had about 6 hours sleep in the past two days and I didn’t mean to go off as much as I did on this.
By the way, if you want to see a different opinion on why someone not from the U.S. likes Zooomr you might want to check out the post that Yuvi wrote about Zooomr today.
http://blog.zooomr.com/2007/01/24/thanks-yuvi/
I know you feel passionately about Flickr and feel very loyal and I actually totally agree with you about Flickr being a super great site. I literally use it every single day. But Zooomr is a great site too and we are working hard every day to make it a better and better site, a truly universal photo sharing site for the entire world, in multi languages, etc. etc.
Well Thomas, your passion for Zooomr certainly runneth over!
Anyway, I don’t want to get in the middle of the debate (other than to offer a friendly reminder that sleep, even for startups, is essential) but instead clarify something you said (specifically: ‘You know, three months ago when Chris Messina IM’d me and said “hey man, you really should check out Magnolia, we’re consulting for the company,” I didn’t bash them for daring to take on delicious.’).
The context is that I read your post about leaving Delicious and thought, “hey, maybe he’d like Ma.gnolia — yikes, conflict of interest aside — I really think he’d appreciate it.”
Sure enough, three months later you blogged about your positive experience with them.
Now, I just want to raise two points of clarification, especially since Tara said, “I don’t know why Chris pitched you… I disagree with that tactic.”
First, I privately IM’d you — as friends often do — outside the context of your blog. I wasn’t looking to advertise Ma.gnolia, simply tell you about a service I happen to enjoy (and who does happen to also be a client — a fortuitous overlap in all honesty).
Second, the practice that Tara’s referring to (spamming folks on your buddy list randomly pushing client services) is also something that I don’t support (and wouldn’t imply that anyone else I trust supports either). Rather, given the context of your blog post I thought it might be worth your while to give Ma.gnolia a shot — no high pressure — and hell, you could have told me to screw off and that would have been cool too.
So what was made to sound like an unsolicited tactic, in the context of this post, was actually nothing of the sort in my recollection.
“Threatened”? I don’t see any threats anywhere… I think Miss Tara is being just as insecure as she claims the others as being.
@nick - I should have clarified that…he said he was removing me from his blogroll and his reading list. I suppose that isn’t a threat, but a statement. And, yes, I was acting immaturely and insecurely. Guilty. Already admitted and discussed with Thomas.
Chris totally man. And I appreciated the IM. It’s certainly not spam and you’re someone I know and I don’t see anything wrong with this at all. Ma.gnolia’s a great site and this wasn’t meant to sound like some sort of spammy thing at all. Heck, I tell people to check out Zooomr all the time. Certainly part of just hanging out and having friends is talking about cool sites even if you are working with/for them. But certainly didn’t mean to suggest anything was out of line with your suggestion. In fact the only reason I mentioned Ma.gnolia in all of this is by way of an unrelated example of something that felt hypocritical on Tara’s part for me. I would not characterize your recommending that site to me as a “pitch” at all.
Sleep is good man but there ain’t no time for it yet. Too much work to do. Too many photos to take. Someday though, someday.
Hi Tara, I’ve been visiting your blog for a while and I’ve been increasingly asking myself: ‘does she knows about The Cathedral and the Bazaar? It looks like she doesn’t’
Forgive me, but I see you (and not only you, a lot of other web2.0 evangelists) going around the issues of that essay and not really getting to the point is really disapponting (Maybe you are just too young, which is a good thing!).
It almost looks like you have been telling the story of the Flickr community without realizing there is a pattern in there: it’s the successful story of the growth of a thriving Bazaar (in the word of ESR).
Besides, wasn’t it better in the old days days of USENET, when you could collapse and entire flame war (I was almost writing ‘dicksize’, but the Wikipedia calls them Holy wars
thread and going on with the constructive thread of the discussion without being distracted?
mauror - So long and thanks for all the fish
I’m getting in here a day late, wanting to give myself some time to reflect before posting. There’s a lot of emotion in this thread, and I should fully disclose before saying anything that I’m on the Ma.gnolia team, but I’m not here to talk about how Ma.gnolia has come into the conversation, because it was just as an example and not an attack at all.
I do want to mention that Tara and Chris don’t help us through direct and respectful advocacy as much as they do through their incredible perspective, insight and limitless optimism. They help us clarify our goals, and tune us into what they hear and see; they challenge our assumptions and our abilities; they praise the good stuff we do and give us straight talk about where we fall short. And when we disagree, they move without effort towards what we can agree on, always keeping in mind that it’s about making Ma.gnolia better. If they were personal trainers, anyone could lose 10lbs in the first two weeks, I’d bet.
I should also mention that we like what Zooomr’s got going on. Portals? Bloody brilliant! In fact, Thomas and I had a good exchange yesterday that led into talk about some integration between Zooomr and Ma.gnolia, which would be a sweet bridge between two growing communities.
Tara’s post didn’t get a fair shake in the comments, because the thread wandered into comparing two products on the basis of features, and got overly personal. Ironically, that’s a lot of what this blog post warned against, instead highlighting the effects of adaptability, attitude, and good will towards members as key parts of the secret to success. What’s amazing is that Tara posts this stuff in the clear, free for anyone to read. No expensive seminar to attend, no subscriptions or consulting fees. The keys to a kingdom of knowledge left out on the table for anyone to pick up and try out. This post is a gift.
I bookmarked this post as one of my all time favorites, and it’s one I’ll re-read and be sure to share. Not because it talks about Ma.gnolia but because you can get the worth of ten books on product management in about 5 minutes of reading and reflection. Thanks Tara!
@mauror - I’ve not only READ the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but I’ve refered to it several times in my blog.
I think it’s an awesome publication + it is absolutely canonical to our era. I do think, however, it is too simplistic to lump all communities centralized and decentralized into this assessment.
Have you also read, “The Starfish and the Spider”?
Oh…and I’m not that young. I have a teenage son, you know…
Is Thomas going to kill me if I say I love Flickr? I think Flickr also made it because it is easy to use. I also think they’ve done a good job of not going into feature overload.
Thomas: It looks like you guys are doing great stuff over there & I will try to upload some photos/check the community out.
Apart from a lot of painful miscommunication, this is an interesting thread which shows a lot of commitment if your read between the lines, from several people I admire.
I sure hope that you’ll convert all this into a very interesting part of your talk at FOWA Tara. looking forward to seeing you speak. Meanwhile, I’ll feed my curiosity with following your thoughts on Twitter.
4 Trackbacks
Why Did Flickr Win?…
Won
Originally uploaded by *Dario*.
As a up and coming company with more then a dash of community about it, I’m interested for Tangler’s sake in what people think are the reasons that Flickr won.
I mean, there were a lot of photo sharing…
Conditions for serendipity…
…
[...] Butterfield: I’m not sure I have a universal answer to that. Take the people working on Flickr, including myself, a lot of the development team and Caterina Fake who’s my wife but also the co-founder; all had really extensive experiences with online communities, most of us going back to the days before the Web. We worked really hard but I don’t think we had any formula for how to pull it off. Flickr could have gone in a million different ways. [...]
[...] inspired by a rather heated ’side discussion’ on my Flickr Love post, I thought it would keep these threads in line. Tell me what you think. I’m giving it a [...]