« Taking the Catalog out of the mix | Main | The Open Source ILS »

Comments

Mike Newberry

For those of you who don't know about Flikr

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.[4]

Early versions 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 backend 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.[5]

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28, 2005, 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.[6]

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.[7] For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

On December 29, 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 (originally a 2GB per month limit).[8]

In January 2007, Flickr announced that the "Old Skool" members, those that pre-date the Yahoo acquisition, would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service.[9] This move was criticized by some users.[10]

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 were removed, with the same applying to tag limits. This contact limit no longer exists.

In June 2007, Flickr changed the tagline on their logo to "Flickr loves you".[

The comments to this entry are closed.

Search Blogging Section


Your email address:


Powered by FeedBlitz

Pages

Blog Contributors

June 2010

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      
Blog powered by Typepad