In Praise of Flickr
Flickr represents one of the very best of things in the history of the internet. It was the first popular way to share photos in a social way instead of photos lingering in private accounts online and in the real world in shoeboxes under beds. It brought millions together and helped kick off first the digital SLR revolution, then it was eclipsed by the mobile photography revolution. Flickr—despite being a big corporate entity—embraced open licensing and took on the ambitious goal of being a mirror and gallery for oodles of museums around the globe.
Countless waves of social apps have eclipsed Flickr itself, and even though I don’t really post there much anymore or browse my friend lists (mostly because they’ve all gone inactive, like me), about once or twice a month I drop into the Flickr Explore page to gaze at what I would describe as an entire year’s worth of epic shots from National Geographic, generated each day, automatically by algorithms.
Via Tim Carmody:
It is bizarre to think now that Flickr was only active for about a year before it was acquired by Yahoo. For those of us who were on the site then, that year felt like everything.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
As a Flickr user who was on the service prior to the Yahoo acquisition, I'm in disbelief that Flickr only existed for 1 year prior to the sale. Wow. And Yahoo has owned it for 12 years now. Where does the time go? I still pay for it just as an extra archive of all of my photos, or the rare occasion when I need to share an album with a bunch of people, but I haven't actively used the site in 6+ years. I'm glad it's still around though.
