| Stewart Butterfield on Flickr | 2005-02-10 22:29 7 comments |
 by Flemming FunchO'Reilly has an excellent interview with Stewart Butterfield who's the CEO of Ludicorp, the company making Flickr. This guy sure has the right attitude. Making cool stuff, facilitating open sharing, and having great success while you're at it. Particularly interesting how the cool stuff and open sharing thing makes sense as a business strategy. It's really valuable for any new product or service to reach the hyper-geek audience, who are particularly influential. And for them, the open API is a sign of good faith, a sign that your photos and your data are not going to be locked up in Flickr--even though we don't currently offer a feature to download your photos to your own computer (we will), you could develop one. If you didn't know, Flickr is a photo sharing site. You can upload your pictures and make galleries of them. You can use it like a more traditional photo site, and just share them with your friends and family. But the new and cool thing is that things are arranged so that you're most likely inspired and motivated to share the pictures with a wider audience. And you can tag the pictures with keywords, and so can other people. And you can designate what kind of license you imply by sharing your photo. And there are various program interfaces that allow people to construct all sorts of cool stuff around it. On their own initiative, without having to ask anybody anything. The picture there is constructed automatically through the Flickr API from a bunch of shared pictures tagged as "squared circles". In case there's any doubt about it, Flickr is going to make billions of dollars before too long, and will blow away any oldfashioned photo gallery sites that are trying to lock you in to their paid services. |