Showing posts with label flickr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flickr. Show all posts

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn’t. Here’s Why.

Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team, where his role as "Architect" was supposedly "vital" to the service. So who better to answer questions about Flickr than Elliott-McCrea (who is now the VP of Engineering for Etsy), right? And that's exactly what he's done on Quora. Specifically, someone asked the question: Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing? The mobile photo space is red-hot right now with several players beyond the two mentioned vying to become a common app on smartphones. And one of them, Instagram, was able to gain over a million users in less than three months. So why wasn't Flickr, with all the resources of Yahoo behind them, able to dominate this space first?

Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn’t. Here’s Why.


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Nk7aebYHyWA/

Why Did Flickr Miss Out On The Mobile Opportunity Instagram Is Winning? (YHOO)

jerry yang head down

Innovator's dilemma, e.g. in order to compete with Twitpic we would have had to be willing to sacrafice our own login system in favor of Twitter's (insecure) one. The Yahoo! Paranoids would have shut us down in a heart beat (See also: http://laughingmeme.org/2009/07/...)


Additionally we fell into the trap of thinking like an incumbent, we spent 6 months off and on talking to Twitter about preferred product placement rather then just shipping the integration we had built.



We also spent *years* debating whether or not to build iPhone apps/iPhone optimized sites or bet on a HTML5/multi-device strategy. And work like the award winning iPhone optimized Flickr mobile site was viewed ambivalently even within the team as it happened largely as a skunk works and was very much hard coded around iPhone's limitations.



Lastly, Marco Boerries was the without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo "Connected Life" team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo.  Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly.   The Flickr iPhone app that eventually shipped was built by CL.



That said it's easy to look at the successful products and wonder how **anyone** could have missed something so obvious, but the debate about what the future of mobile photography and photo sharing looked like was a fairly active one. Perhaps less remembered the innovated Radar.net social/mobile photo app/site was very visibly struggling to gain traction throughout this whole time period, and many less interesting attempts never made it to the gate.



Prototypes like Flickr for Busy People (http://flickrforbusypeople.appsp...) and the semi-integrated Photos Nearby (http://www.flickr.com/nearby) both built by Aaron Straup Cope, as well as the afore mentioned iPhone optimized http://m.flickr.com were partially byproducts of those long running internal debates about how to do mobile.



It would actually be incredibly straightforward to build something like an Instagram on top of Flickr using the API, especially if you could convince Flickr to release an API to "Beehive" the friend finder tool, which among other things, benefits from Y! backdoor deal with Facebook.

This post originally appeared as an answer on Quora and is reprinted with permission here. Kellan Elliott-McCrea formerly worked at Flickr and is now a VP of engineering at Etsy.

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See Also:




Why Did Flickr Miss Out On The Mobile Opportunity Instagram Is Winning? (YHOO)


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/T7MnCrmAnm4/why-did-flickr-miss-out-on-the-mobile-opportunity-instagram-is-going-after-2010-12

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Arcgis.com bigger than Flickr?

Ok, so ESRI confirmed that there were indeed 400 million maps created on arcgis.com in October, but I am still not convinced…

Arcgis.com bigger than Flickr?


Backlink: http://www.geocomrade.com/2010/12/22/arcgis-com-bigger-than-flickr/

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Compete Top 50: Bing And Ask Rise – MySpace, MapQuest And Flickr Fall

Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites). Compete's data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft's search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year).

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TN5-i3URmCM/