An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello
What new features were driven by user demand?
Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.
Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you’ve tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.
I would have thought that people would be most interested in their own little world – themselves, their friends, their family. But what happened was that once they got hooked on the site on that small scale, people wanted to see that big picture. They wanted to feel like participants in this larger community.
Yeah, that was definitely a surprise to us. Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.
And people certainly use it in different ways. I primarily use it to share photos with my friends and family, and most of my photos are restricted so that only people I’ve said are my friends and family can view them. But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.
You mentioned del.icio.us earlier as the inspiration for Flickr’s use of tags. What are some of the other inspirations for the interface and the user experience of Flickr?
Netflix had this very innovative little interface where you could rate movies on their site that was all done client-side. You clicked on one of five stars to indicate your rating, and it talked back to the server without reloading the page. So it was natural as we started to build the Flickr site that we would take that a little bit further. I think one of the first things we did was make it so you could edit titles and descriptions on photo pages by just clicking on the text and, through the magic of Ajax, no page refresh, but your data has changed. So Netflix is an indirect influence.
What do you think the difference is between Flickr and older, more established photo-sharing sites?
People who come to Flickr want an audience. We’re all about facilitating sharing however you want, whereas the other sites are more about uploading your photos to a place where you can easily print them.
Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.
Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you’ve tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.
I would have thought that people would be most interested in their own little world – themselves, their friends, their family. But what happened was that once they got hooked on the site on that small scale, people wanted to see that big picture. They wanted to feel like participants in this larger community.
Yeah, that was definitely a surprise to us. Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.
And people certainly use it in different ways. I primarily use it to share photos with my friends and family, and most of my photos are restricted so that only people I’ve said are my friends and family can view them. But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.
You mentioned del.icio.us earlier as the inspiration for Flickr’s use of tags. What are some of the other inspirations for the interface and the user experience of Flickr?
Netflix had this very innovative little interface where you could rate movies on their site that was all done client-side. You clicked on one of five stars to indicate your rating, and it talked back to the server without reloading the page. So it was natural as we started to build the Flickr site that we would take that a little bit further. I think one of the first things we did was make it so you could edit titles and descriptions on photo pages by just clicking on the text and, through the magic of Ajax, no page refresh, but your data has changed. So Netflix is an indirect influence.
What do you think the difference is between Flickr and older, more established photo-sharing sites?
People who come to Flickr want an audience. We’re all about facilitating sharing however you want, whereas the other sites are more about uploading your photos to a place where you can easily print them.
posted by Rahul at 11:06 PM
1 Comments:
neat...too bad most features are all about Amerikans!
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