Flickr Hacks

Preface

In February 2004, a tiny startup in Vancouver called Ludicorp launched a web site for sharing photos called Flickr. Using some of the tools they’d built for their primary product (a web game called Game Neverending), Ludicorp quickly changed the way millions of people share photos. Just one year and one month after its launch, web giant Yahoo! purchased Flickr—with rumors putting the price tag at somewhere around $30 million. Yahoo! is now working diligently to “Flickrize” all of its features by adapting the innovations that Flickr brought to photo sharing to Yahoo!’s existing features for searching, shopping, and travel planning.

So, what exactly did Flickr accomplish that attracted millions of users and has an established web company changing the way it does business? The answer isn’t an easy one, but studying how Flickr has taken the world by storm can give us some indication of where the Web is headed.

One innovation that Flickr pioneered is the act of tagging digital content. Instead of imposing a category system, Flickr lets individual photographers do the hard work of classifying photos. For example, a photo of a car can be tagged with words such as car or automobile, or with more specific descriptive terms such as Honda, convertible, or shiny. Then, others interested in pictures of cars, convertibles, or shiny things can browse those tags to find photos that might interest them. Tagging is a clever way to loosely connect photos without a structured categorization ...