I am super bored of hearing this.
Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.
In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the world’s biggest photo-sharing site, and tagged photos was key to its early growth, something Flickr didn’t add until 2007)
But that’s in retrospect. In 2005, it wasn’t at all clear what to do. Everyone in the industry was still feeling the burn of gigantic, unprofitable acquisitions prior to the great crash of 2001, so paying money for an barely-profitable site like Flickr still seemed like madness, even within Yahoo. So Yahoo focussed on making it profitable — and succeeded, which is no mean feat.
Could Flickr have done better staying independent? Absolutely no way.
And the way you can tell that for sure is that they let Yahoo acquire them. It’s not like Yahoo in 2005 had a great reputation; the only reason you’d do it is if you were out of money and out of options. In 2005, nobody was going to give Flickr the hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital they needed and hope for the best: it was exit or die.
On top of the bare financial reality, it is an open secret at Yahoo (my former employer) that Flickr’s internals are and have always been an architectural nightmare. They had no idea how to scale and needed huge investment just to dig themselves out of the technical debt they’d accrued. It could have been better, sure, but without Yahoo it would have been much, much worse.
Yahoo didn’t kill Flickr; Yahoo saved Flickr from itself.
Here’s a lesser-heard take on the Yahoo/Tumblr thing from Laurie Voss, who is a former Yahoo employee and has some good insight on the matter as a result.
Mike Isaac for AllThingsD:
At last count, more than 90 million people use Instagram on a monthly basis, the company said on Thursday. Moreover, the company is seeing growth rather than decline; that number is up ten percent, month on month, in the period from December to January.
Wait. How is that possible? Everyone left Instagram last month, remember?
Personal take: Instagram had a cruddy December, and I stopped using it personally — not so much because of the ToS thing but because of the business decisions they were making (see: Twitter cards). And, honestly, it gave me an opportunity to get a good hard look at Camera+ — an app I love — and the updated Flickr. Now, whether or not people are actually leaving, they did lose some cred with the diehards last month and it’ll be interesting to see if they can gain that cred back. — Ernie @ SFB
Looking for another excuse to leave Instagram, controversy or not? Now’s a good time to try Flickr, which (on top of having a very solid new iOS app) is offering three free months of Pro service to new and existing members, which you can take advantage of over this way.
As the veteran venture capitalist Bill Gurley said recently, it’s important to be an optimist in the startup business, as most great tech companies “will sail close to death and then rise up again.” Just a year and a half ago, Aviary, a New York startup focused on creative tools for photo editing, was certainly lost at sea, its original vision floundering. But by drastically shifting its focus from the web to mobile, and from a consumer facing startup to one that powers other businesses, Aviary has become a juggernaut, the closest thing to a modern day Adobe for the mobile era.A great business story and just the kind of innovation the photo industry needs.
“When we were web only, during a big day, we might have 100,000 people edit photos. This year, more than 50 million people used our tools on Thanksgiving.”
Speaking of Flickr, time for an update on the the Popular Cameraphones chart:
1) iPhone 4S
2) iPhone 4
3) iPhone 3GS
4) iPhone 3G
5) Samsung Galaxy S II
The good news: Android is finally on the verge of overtaking an iOS device on the chart.
The bad news: this iOS device is four years old. It’s so old, in fact, that the iPhone 3G was taken off the market by Apple a year ago. Yet there still isn’t a single Android device that can pass it on this chart. Pretty pathetic.
The other bad news: the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 are so far ahead of the rest of the cameraphone pack that it seems highly unlikely that any Android device will come close anytime soon. In fact, they’re the number one and number two cameras used to take Flickr photos, period. Not smartphone cameras — cameras, cameras.
The really bad news: the new iPhone is a month away.
But on the other hand, we’re talking about the Android community, where there are so many varieties of phones out there that it’s possible that if you combined them all together, it might be a different picture. The reason why the iPhone and iPhone 4S models rank so high on this chart is because of lack of splintering … right?
Speaking of Marissa Mayer, seems like people are already pinning their hopes and dreams on the new Yahoo CEO.
You don’t know him, but you’ve seen his work: The rise of Creative Commons has leveled the playing field for bloggers, giving many the opportunity to illustrate stories with free-to-use images that are at times comparable to wire photos. But the quality varies, and it’s rare to find someone sharing high-quality pictures consistently — but Gage Skidmore pulls it off. The 18-year-old photographer, who shoots celebrities and conservative politicians largely as a hobby, has uploaded nearly 9,000 photos to Flickr since early 2008, and thanks to favorable licensing, finds his photos of famous and important people in use all over the Web — including such sites as MSNBC, Fox News, The Atlantic and Mashable. What drives his work? Click on to see his take on the matter.
The World’s Largest Photo Libraries
In which Facebook pretty much proves how much it’s taken over our lives.
Flickr got a front-page redesign: It’s a bit of a change from simplistic-yet-photo-heavy approach, but it’s not awful by any stretch (and it appears to be mostly to introduce new users to the service, as the current design is basically the same once you’ve logged in). What do you guys think about Yahoo’s photo-focused jewel?
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