Flickr was founded in 2004 as an online game called Game Neverending, but was later transformed into a photo sharing site. It grew rapidly and by 2011 had over 50 million registered users sharing over 6 billion photos. The site influenced many artists and was known for its creative commons licensing that allowed non-commercial sharing of photos. In 2012, Flickr announced changes to modernize the site's design and features to be more like Pinterest, including justified viewing of photos and new drag and drop uploading. The updates aimed to increase user engagement with Flickr's large collection of geotagged photos.

1. past, present and future

2. The Past
 Founded in 2004 by a Vancouver based company called Ludicorp
 Created primarily by Steward Butterfield and Caterina Fake
• “I’m a big proponent of people having the ability to express themselves and be part of a
culture that supports creative work [and] everyone should also have the ability not to
be constrained by copyright.”—Creative Commons
 A year after its launch, Ludicorp is bought by Yahoo!

3. The Beginning
 Flickr was created to be a multiplayer online game
 Then was turned into a chat system with live photo-sharing options
 Next the coding system for the game and created what is currently viewed as
the beginning of Flickr, but was eventually dropped
 Later, even the chat system called Flickr Live, which was the basis of the
earlier versions of the site, was erased
 Consumers ultimately didn’t want to chat – they wanted to share their
experiences in pictures and not in instant messages.

4. The Present
In 2011:
 Flickr had more than 50 million registered user accounts
 More than 80 million unique visits
 More 0.4 billion page views
 All these makes it the 22 nd largest in the world, according to our top 30 social media
sites rank list
 The total number of images is 6 billion. Most of them are shared there under the
creative commons license or non commercial purposes
 Of those people influenced by Flickr some of those are artists outside of the photography world,
such as a visual artists Erik Kessel

5. Influenced by Flickr: Dutch visual artist, Erik Kessel
Kessel was quoted as saying, “[My]
Exhibit was created as a visualization
of the amount of photos added or
goal was to make-real the
shared on Flickr within a single 24- mountains of personal information
hour period! and data that people share every
single day” –Creative Review

6. Mashable Tech
“Flickr Gets a Makeover, Looks Like
Pinterest”, 21 February 2012
By
Zoe Fox

7. Future
Flickr's new photo viewer looks a lot
New Feature #1
like Pinterest. Photos are arranged
closely next to each other and scroll
endlessly, without redirecting to new Justified View
pages. –Mashable
which will go live Feb 28, trades
white space-filled layout.

8. Future
The site has plans to streamline the
New Feature #2
view of other elements of the site to
resemble the new viewer. – Mashable
Photostreaming
There will be visible white space surrounding the
photos in each stream.
You see photo titles and can select which size you'd
like to view photos.

9. Future
The upload feature dubbed Uploadr, New Feature #3
which will go live in late March, lets
you drag and drop photos from your Uploadr
computer onto the site.
Acts more like an app and less like a website
allowing you to drag and drop photos from your
computer onto the site
Photos are instantly viewed as thumbnail
images, allowing you to add tags as you upload
 Supposed increase engagement, to build the
Internet’s largest collection of geo-tagged
photos (currently numbering at about 270
million)

10. Flickr inspires
• A YouTube video of how Flickr inspires creation. A musician named
Jonathon Coulton creates a video inspired by Flickr only photos.
Flickr @ Bumbershoot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=328QT3AoVCg

11. Questions/ Things to think about…
 “It seems to speak to a new aesthetic and function –
one dedicated to the exploration of the urban eye and
its relation to decay, alienation, kitsch, and its ability to
locate beauty in the mundane” (Murray) Do you find
this to be true?
 Are we a society of over-sharers?
 Do you feel photo sharing online has more positive or
negative consequences?

12. Flickr
References:
"Flickr – World’s Social Photo Album – History." Flickr. Business Ideas Master, 28 Jan. 2012.
Web. 21 Feb. 2012. <http://bigbusinessideas.org/flickr-worlds-social-photo-album-
history/>.
Fox, Zoe. "Featured in Social Media." Mashable. 21 Feb. 2012. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.
<http://mashable.com/2012/02/21/new-flickr/>.
Cox, A.M. (2008). Flickr: A case study of Web2.0. Aslib Proceedings, 60 (5), pp. 493-516.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012530810908210
Katayama, Lisa. "Flickr." - Creative Commons. 8 Dec. 2010. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.
<http://creativecommons.org/tag/flickr>
Murray, S. (2008). Digital images, photo-sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday
aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1470412908091935