Flickr Blog

Firstly anyone commenting on this post should also take a look at the current article on "HelpSpot’s First 6 Months of Sales" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199688 to get an idea of real numbers.

"Replicating that experience on-line is difficult. Tipjoy is notably lacking in that regard. The main page is made up of a bunch of (dry) statistics. Hello, this isn’t Microsoft Excel! What are they trying to sell—business analytics?? Where’s the sidebar advertising how your Tipjoy data can be added to your Facebook/Myspace site? Where’s the banner that says “Show your girlfriend you really like her latest Facebook post?”... it must market itself as a social service. It must integrate into life, or life will continue to pass by outside of it. ..."

Spot on comment. Require tools, samples and blog articles to do this. Make this task, easier than the best examples you find.

"... Lesson: To succeed in Web 2.0 your site can not be an optional layer added to people’s lives. It must be inserted directly into the lives of the consumer ..."

The author gets to what I think is a problem for most web businesses.

"... And one last thing. No credit cards? Hey dudes, it’s 2008, Web 2.0. Instead of “Coming Soon” it should say “transaction charge”. Leave the choice to the consumer. ..."

Author doesn't know what he's talking about here. Anything to do with money, transactions requires cash and likely regulation. One startup I worked for had to fork over $USD250K and deal with unsavoury…

Here's the message I posted on my Facebook page if you want to copy it to share with less technically aware friends:

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The largest coordinated online protest in the internet's history is going on today, with the goal of stopping legislation that threatens the internet as we know it. If you think the internet is pretty cool the way it is, take a few minutes to click some of these links or at least share this post with others.

Good video explaining the bills, "SOPA" and "PIPA": http://vimeo.com/31100268

An open letter written by "83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers", strongly opposing these measures with excellent explanations: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa

Some of the larger sites protesting today, with more details and easy ways to take action:
https://www.google.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://eugene.craigslist.org/ (all craigslist sites)
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.wired.com/
http://wordpress.com/
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://php.net/
http://www.rackspace.com/
http://oreilly.com/
http://boingboing.net/
http://xkcd.com/
http://blog.flickr.net/en
http://www.gnu.org/
http://techcrunch.com/
http://imgur.com/
http://www.newgrounds.com/

I think you're missing the point. Flickr has a grand total of somewhere over 5 billion photos. [1] Facebook adds four billion photos to its collection every month. [2]

I agree that many of the best photos will be reshared elsewhere, for now, but think ahead a little:

- Facebook could just improve their photo hosting just a bit -- or add a for-pay option to do so -- and then eliminate any other photo hosting site's reason for existing.

- If you think about all the photos ever taken, artistic photography has always been a tiny, tiny niche market. Photos have always been about remembering and sharing, not art. And this is true of Flickr just as much as Facebook. Nowadays this extends to recording our lives practically minute by minute. The metadata associated with this is invaluable -- yes, ad targeting is part of it, but the sheer documentary volume is also important for a search company like Google, even if we limit ourselves to what EXIF can tell us.

[1] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/09/19/5000000000/

[2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-Facebook-each-day?q=how+many+photos

Just an update: the harpoons did fail, but the engineers were very concerned about marked fluctuations in the telemetry. There was a suggestion that the lander might actually be tumbling, but those fears seem to have been allayed by the fact that the oscillations seem to have stopped. The engineers will comb through the data over the coming hours, in anticipation of the next downlink, which should be around 4:30am CET (13th Nov). It seems like there might have been bit of a bounce, and the lander might have landed twice! So long as the downlink is available during the next pass, it seems like the lander has weathered the worst of the landing.

Science data has been downlinked, so fingers crossed we'll get some nice images from the surface pretty soon! There's a nice shot of the lander on the way down released already [3].

Sources:

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30031531

[2] Personal communication from ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany

[3] https://blog.flickr.net/en/2014/11/12/rosettas-philae-probe-has-successfully-landed-on-a-comet/?linkId=10509947

Under Marissa Mayer's watch, Yahoo has been investing tremendous effort in refining the UX on their web/mobile properties like Yahoo Weather [1], Flickr [2], and Yahoo Sports [3].

Seems like they're giving people a reason to use their products, and then making a play to have an OAuth-level relationship with the users. Maybe they want visibility into how a user authorizes third-party apps (FB gets an awful lot of insight from FB connect!) or maybe they just want to solidify their user lock-in.

Either way, I can't imagine they justified the engineering work for massive redesign on seemingly not-profitable properties like Weather/Flickr without having a solid long-term plan for how to capitalize on that.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/15/yahoo-weather-android-redesign/
[2] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/20/a-better-brighter-flickr/
[3] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/yahoo-sports-gets-ios-7-redesign-awesome-gif-creation-tool-for-sharing-big-4-sports-moments/

Here's the blog post on this:

https://blog.flickr.net/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-photos/

At first glance it seemed like a way to bring in more money, but the points they bring up actually seem fairly reasonable.

The rough tl;dr is:

1. Giving a free terabyte to every user brought in lower-quality content as people came just for free storage, hurting Flickr's mission of being a site for quality content by photographers / artists

2. Subscriptions help them make money from the product instead of the users (I don't really buy this one, they don't have any reason to stop selling user data just because of this change)

3. They want to remind people that file storage costs them a fair chunk of money to keep running, and it's not something that's magically free