What Is Flickr’s Story – How Steward Butterfield and Caterina Fake Founded Flickr.com

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History


The world as we know it… filled with nature’s beauty and our imagination’s view of it. The best way to share the marvelous experience of watching the local marines sail off, waving at the crowds at the port, or the beautiful new bud of your favorite in-house flower is by taking a photo of the vent or item you want to share and post it somewhere for all to see…  or just the ones you want. In the past, there have been many places where one can do this – PhotoBucket, MySpace, or even Facebook, but there is only one social network that is all about sharing photos and images. This is Flickr – the only venue for quality, and not-so-quality, photographs to spread their photos and tell what they want openly for the world to see.

Flickr - Share Your Life in Photos
Flickr – Share Your Life in Photos

A project founded in 2004 by Vancouver-based company Ludicorp (coming from the Latin word for ‘play’ actually), Flickr, as we know it today, is nothing like it was supposed to be in the very beginning. In reality, this website was made out to be a kind of multiplayer online game, which eventually was turned into a chat system with live photo-sharing options. While the team behind Flickr, namely the couple Steward Butterfield and Caterina Fake, was working on quite a big number of settings and possibilities for the project, they ultimately got rid of the coding system for the game and created what is currently viewed as the beginning of Flickr. Later, even the chat system called Flickr Live, which was the basis of the earlier versions of the site was erased since the entire character of the portal has transformed into something a lot more different than planned too.  Also, we must never forget that, just like languages and cooking, the internet is something ever-changing and there is nothing still inside the World Wide Web. Every site is what the users want it to be, the users of Flickr didn’t want to chat – they wanted to share their experiences in pictures and not in instant messages.



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Flickr is Yahoo’s

In March 2005, just a year after Flickr was on the internet, Lodicorp is bought by Yahoo! for the rumored price of about 35 million dollars. This begins the streak of changes to the general interface of the site, which are not liked by many of the users but appreciated by others. Naturally, since Flickr stayed on top of the photo chain and is always updating and upgrading its interface, it has not only become, but also stayed the top choice for both professional and aspiring photographers to share their work with the world.

Flickr Today

Currently, the world’s photo album, as many would call it, is without a doubt the biggest place to put up your photography no matter what and when you’ve pictured, no matter if it’s shopped or plain, grayscale or full with enchanting colors – Flickr has changed from a little addition to Ludicorp’s online Game Neverending to the world’s greatest photo-sharing online website.

In the middle of 2011, Flickr had more than 50 000 000 registered user accounts and more than 80 000 000 unique visits, and 0.4 billion page views. This makes it one of the biggest social places on the web, actually the 22nd in the world, according to our top 30 social media sites rank list. Thousands of photos are uploaded any minute on the site and this number reaches more than 4 million photos every single day. The number of all images uploaded there has grown to 6 000 000 000 (6 billion). Most of them are shared there under the creative commons license, which means that everybody can use them for non-commercial purposes.