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| © Stewart Butterfield |
| Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield |
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield
Founders, Flickr
On List Because: They have created a true online community of photo sharers
Secret of Their Success: Eagerness in embracing new technology to make user experience enjoyable
Quote: "If you're tired of Flickr, you're tired of life."
Website: flickr.com
When Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield started Flickr in 2004, their big idea was also a simple one -- their photo-sharing site would actually make it easy to share photos.
While sites such as Photobucket and Webshots require users to register before they can view friends' photos, Flickr automatically makes photos public, giving users the option to keep certain images private. In a 2006 summary that appeared on the Startup Review blog (startup-review.com), former Sierra Ventures analyst Nisan Gabbay wrote that this emphasis on making users' first experience enjoyable is one of several reasons Flickr has been so successful.
Since its creation, Flickr has grown to four million users. It was sold to Yahoo in March 2005 for between $20 and $30 million.
Gabbay also lauds Flickr's rapid development cycle, in which new versions of software are released every half hour in response to users' comments. Chief among Flickr's tools is software that allows "the best quality photos on a given theme [to] rise to the top," as Gabbay writes.
This filtering system began with tagging -- the assignment of keywords by photographers to their own photographs -- which makes searches on the site more efficient and descriptive (for instance, being able to search for "funny" photos). Although tagging had been used successfully before (most notably with the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us), Flickr did what it does best and fully embraced the technology early on. It likewise recently adopted "clusters," which are algorithm-created tag groups that help define similar tags; for instance Turkey, the country, versus turkey, the bird, and turkey, the food.
Then there is the "interestingness" rating, an algorithm that considers factors such as number of views, number of comments, and prior attention to determine which photos are most "interesting," thrusting them into the spotlight and often bringing them a flood of traffic. This strong community and opportunity for feedback is one of the reasons Flickr has been so successful, says Fake.
"A lot of the reason people contribute photos is because they are getting attention for their work," says Fake. "Flickr has a built-in audience."
While Flickr is essentially a community of amateur photographers, it has created several homegrown stars.
There's the Icelandic woman who was featured in the Wall Street Journal after her Flickr site received more than 1.6 million visits. Or the Flickr user who was recruited to shoot a Land Rover ad. Numerous Flickr freelancers have been contacted by cash-strapped publications that don't want to pay travel expenses for their own photographer.
Fake refuses to speculate about new programs to make it easier for Flickr users to sell their work or about the site's potential as a stock house, but considering the company's emphasis on innovation, such developments could well be possible. For now, Fake says, Flickr must maintain its sense of discovery. She says she still routinely gets sucked in for hours going from picture to picture. "If you're tired of Flickr, you're tired of life," she says.
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