At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day.Įarly on in its development, Flickr introduced a feature enabling users to attach 'tags' to their photographs. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr 'photostreams'. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr's databases. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.įlickr's designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking - namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. And it's gone on like that ever since.įlickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. By the end of March 2005, the number was up to 7.9 million. On 26 February 2004, it held 7,445 photos. It was a brilliant idea - a killer web application whose usefulness was immediately apparent. So suddenly instead of crashing your friends' inboxes and choking their bandwidth by sending them images as email attachments, you could send them a link and they could see for themselves. It launched, an image-hosting service that enabled users to upload their pictures, have them automatically resized and given a unique URL, and displayed on the web for all to see. Very few digital pictures were printed most were uploaded to a PC, where they mouldered on a hard drive and were rarely viewed thereafter.īut in late February 2004, a small Vancouver-based start-up changed all that. Until four years ago, a predictable response would have been a shrug. So, every day, billions of digital photographs are taken.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |