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Flickr

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Flickr
Type of site
Photo sharing
OwnerYahoo!
Created byLudicorp
URLhttp://www.flickr.com/
CommercialYes

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.


History

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company founded in 2002. Ludicorp launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's back end systems evolved away from the Game Neverending's codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.[1]

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.[2]

On May 16, 2006 Flickr updated its services from Beta to "Gamma" along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "Gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement[3]. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

On December 29th, 2006 the upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100Mb a month (from 20Mb) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (up from 2Gb per month).

In late January, 2007 Flickr announced that the "Old Skool" members, those that pre-date the Yahoo acquisition, will be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service.[4] This move was criticised by some users.

Flickr later added limits of 3,000 contacts and 75 tags for photos. Pre-existing accounts with over 3,000 contacts would not be able to add more until some are removed, the same applies to tag limits.

Features

Organization

File:Screenshot-HotTags-Flickr.png
A screenshot of hot tags on Flickr.

Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword "tags" (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy, although Thomas Vander Wal suggested Flickr is not the best example of folksonomy[5]. Also, Flickr was one of the first websites to implement tag clouds.

Flickr also allows users to categorize their photos into "sets", or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. However, sets are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to many sets, or one set, or none at all (the concept is directly analogous to the "labels" in Google's Gmail). Flickr's "sets", then, represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy.

Finally, Flickr offers a fairly comprehensive web-service API that allows programmers to create applications that can perform almost any function a user on the Flickr site can do.

Organizr

Organizr is a web application for organizing photos within a Flickr account. It allows users to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map (a feature provided in conjunction with Yahoo! Maps). It uses Ajax to closely emulate the look, feel, and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management applications. Because of this, Organizr greatly simplifies the batch organization of photos, which is more cumbersome with the web interface.

Access control

Flickr provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private. Private images are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family. Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private then all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public then the photo becomes public as well. Flickr also provides a "contact list" which can be used to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

In Fall 2006 Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows for private photos to be shared with non Flickr members. For instance, a person could email this pass to parents who may not have an account to allow them see the photos otherwise restricted from public view. This setting allows sets to be shared, or all photos under a certain privacy category (friends or family) to be shared.

Many of its users allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos. By default, other users can leave comments about any image they have permission to view, and in some cases can add to the list of tags associated with an image.

Interaction and compatibility

Flickr's functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services.

The core functionality of the site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, allowing for wide compatibility among platforms and browsers. Organizr uses Ajax, with which most modern browsers are compliant, and most of Flickr's other text-editing and tagging interfaces also possess Ajax functionality.

Images can be posted to the user's collection via email attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and applications with email capabilities.

Flickr has increasingly been adopted by many web users as their primary photo storage site, especially members of the weblog community. In addition, it is popular with Macintosh and Linux users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the Windows/Internet Explorer setup to work.

Archiving

With an active free account users only have access to the most recent 200 images he or she has uploaded. Older images are not deleted, and are still accessible via their URLs (e.g. linked from another website); however, they will no longer be accessible to tag or edit from the user's Flickr account.[6]

If a user decides to upgrade to a Pro account, then they will regain access to the photos older than their current 200.

Licensing

Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons attribution-based and minor content-control licenses - although jurisdiction-specific licenses cannot be selected. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

Since August 24 2006, certain Yahoo! web searches will return image results from Flickr, for example "funny photos" or "travel photography".[7]

Google also shows Flickr pages especially when searching for screen names and owner names. But this does not mean that searching the words in Flickr photo titles or tags that Flickr pages will show up.

Software architecture

Cal Henderson, a Flickr developer, revealed much of the service's backend in a 2005 PowerPoint presentation at the Vancouver PHP Association. The platform consisted of:

Notes and references

  1. ^ "US Patent Application 20060242139: Interestingness ranking of media objects". Butterfield; Daniel S. ; et al. October 26, 2006. Retrieved 2007-01-21.
  2. ^ "Data moving to U.S. very soon!". Flickr. 2005-06-10. Retrieved 2006-09-04. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "What does Flickr Gamma mean?". Flickr. Retrieved 2006-09-04.
  4. ^ "Yahoo! IDs, signing in and screen names". Flickr. Retrieved 2007-02-01.
  5. ^ Vander Wal, Thomas (2006-01-17). "Folksonomy Research Needs Cleaning Up". Retrieved 2006-09-04. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ "I have a free account. Some of my photos aren't showing up. Why?". Flickr. Retrieved 2006-09-04.
  7. ^ Yahoo! (2006-08-24). "Yahoo! Search blog: It's a Flickr Moment!". Retrieved 2007-01-01.

See also

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