and only save five. So people started taking more photographs, but sharing
them became an increasing problem. Then, the next step in the evolution in the
photograph was when it was attached to a delivery mechanism. A camera is now
in a phone and you can send the photo immediately.
There are cameras everywhere now. Nokia is apparently the biggest distributor
of cameras in the world. And people are taking photographs of things that
you would not normally take photographs of—maybe a funny thing that they
see on their way to work. One completely new behavior that we saw was that
people were taking photographs specifically to participate in a group on Flickr.
Content gets more and more defined. For example, if there’s a car accident
on this corner right now, that would be really interesting to you and me and the
people that live within a five-block radius: there’s an accident at 18th and
Sanchez. Not interesting to people who live in Istanbul, or even people who are
ten blocks away. People can find things that are relevant to them more easily,
and I think that tagging has a lot to do with why that’s possible.
Here’s an example: there’s a guy who was on vacation in Maine and got an
alarming phone call from one of his neighbors saying that his apartment building
(in Atlanta, Georgia) was on fire. So he immediately went on line to Flickr
and typed the name of his apartment complex, “Atlantic Landing Georgia,” and
found all of these pictures of his apartment complex on fire. He was able to see
that the fire was on the opposite side of the building and that his apartment
wasn’t affected, so he didn’t have to panic and call his insurance company; he
could continue on his vacation.
Livingston: What surprised you most?
Fake: The whole thing has been a surprise. We started out expecting to do the
game and we ended up doing a photo-sharing site. We never expected that,
could not have planned that.
The success that Flickr has seen has been a huge surprise. Obviously when
you start a business you hope and pray that it will be successful, but I think it’s
also something of a surprise when it actually happens.
Also, we could not have timed it better. All of these things were in the air:
blogging, social networking, camera phones, the ubiquity of network, suddenly
more people were on broadband. All these things converged at the same time
and we were really well-positioned to ride that wave.
Livingston: Were you nervous about any competitors?
Fake: There were people that did pieces of what we did, like Ofoto, but the