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March 21, 2005

My Friend Flickr, Welcome to Yahoo!

My heart jumped with excitement today when I logged on and saw the news. Like other Flickr people, I'd been reading the rumors: Yahoo! might buy Flickr. As a longtime Yahoo, the possibility absolutely thrilled me. Again, we would show the Web that Yahoo! had got its groove back. I watched and waited hopefully.

You see, for the last few months I've been immersed in Flickr--addicted to never-ending discovery, wandering through a landscape of marvelous images from people all over the world. I was weaving my own photographic narrative into the collective tapestry, making contact with folks like me, who also take pictures of rust, rocks, leaves, watery reflections, window scenes.

On Flickr, a pattern language is evolving for visual conversations that are information-rich and unencumbered by barriers of time or space, age or language. I'm certainly not the first person to notice something out of the ordinary. Flickr creates new modes of community and inspires playful innovation, cool extensions, new application software, and ardent devotion. Wow!

The Flickr community has built an ecosystem, a meme pool of images. Flickr APIs are open and also beautiful, as Nate Koechley (another Yahoo) reminds us. Hosting millions of images from hundreds of thousands of users, the Flickr community develops and shares tools and collaborations that generate new utility, original art, inventive information remixes, and ever more user engagement.

By letting Flickr stay Flickr, this unique community can continue to flourish and feed invention across Yahoo! and the Web. Flickr can make us smarter, and help us grow and cultivate a garden of collaborative, user-driven web services. I sense the start of a beautiful friendship, as long as we never forget the incredible lightness that makes Flickr so easy to love.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

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Comments

Do you guys know if it is supposed to be integrated to Yahoo! 360¨ (360.yahoo.com)?

Posted by: Guillaume | March 21, 2005 08:18 AM

pretty slick app...much easier to handle than picasa from the outset (picasa's a bit hyped), and puts you squarely in competition with elGoog in the category of "things for our users to use with no hope of ever generating revenue" - very clever strategy...i believe that picasa's only advantage at this point is that the name is easier to spell (no joke, i asked a few people what they'd type in when asked to go to flickr's site...sure enough, they all added the 'e'...have you been to flicker.com's site? anybody?)

Posted by: dave | March 21, 2005 09:34 PM

Picasa and Flickr are two entirely different things. I don't even know how, after using them both, one could think that they are, in any way, similar and competitive.

Picasa is a great desktop app (for organization and basic photo editing) and Flickr is, well, it's a web site (web tool, really, but web based - not desktop).

Posted by: Ben | March 22, 2005 04:53 AM

Yahoo already have photos to its site. I don,t know what yahoo is going to do with this. May be adding people to their site.(registered members)

Posted by: Ayub | March 22, 2005 08:11 AM

Is there any indication at this point what on how the end reader is accepting RSS feeds? Our company is committed to syndication, but we're seeing a very, VERY slow ramp up on the number of users reading rss feeds for retail purchases, excluding any data amazon / ebay may produce regarding rss.

Posted by: Lou | March 22, 2005 02:53 PM

Yes, I feel also Flickr-life brings me something very different, an experience more people should discover ans share. I have three blogs, two in french (present, past) and the english ParisBalade whose adress I left on this blog. But being flickerite, brings me event more, if one can say. There are so many ways to discover others and others to note you. A userexperience, others should learn to imitate, and one I really hope the Yahoo will preserve even for the "Blogger"s from Google.

The importance is so well expressed in this paper, I have nothing to add to it. From my site "joyoflife" (of julie70) on flickr, I could, at my age, past 70, share with so many others and discover new people and words.

Posted by: julie70 | March 25, 2005 02:09 AM

Ratusan mahasiswa dan aktivis lembaga swadaya masyarakat kembali menggelar aksi unjuk rasa di Gedung DPRD Kalimantan Timur di Samarinda, Kamis (13/1). Mereka mendesak kejaksaan dan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) mengusut tuntas dugaan penyelewengan dana Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Daerah juga ABPN serta illegal logging yang melibatkan Gubernur Kaltim Suwarna Abdul Fatah.
DPRD Kaltim Didesak Membuat Pansus Korupsi Gubernur
Dalam aksinya, demonstran membagi-bagikan selebaran berisi ajakan dan keprihatinan atas berbagai korupsi yang diduga melibatkam Suwarna. Sedangkan dalam orasinya, mahasiswa mendesak DPRD membuat panitia khusus untuk mengungkap dugaan korupsi yang melibatkan Gubernur Kaltim tersebut. Unjuk rasa itu merupakan lanjutan dari aksi sebelumnya di Kejaksaan Tinggi setempat

Posted by: muhammad sobri | March 30, 2005 04:32 PM