growing at such a fast rate, we were barely keeping up on the back end. You
know, all those scaling issues that come with rapid growth.
Livingston: What else happened?
Fake: Tagging really revolutionized the way that the product behaved. Tagging
is an incredibly simple concept: you just add a keyword to the photograph, and
once it’s networked with all of these other people, you can see not only all the
things that you’ve tagged (so it acts like this organizational system for yourself)
but you can also see what everyone else in the system has tagged themselves in
the public stuff.
So if you go to Tokyo and you take photographs, you can then visit the global
Tokyo tag and see what everyone else has taken. You can find photographs of
anything—mountain goats, McDonald’s, anything that you can think of you can
find in Flickr.
The other thing that tagging enables is the ability to see newsworthy events.
Suddenly there’ll be photos that are uploaded all at once from Live 8 concerts
or the bombings in London. You have the ability to immediately surface all of
these events from people distributed all over the globe.
When the Australian embassy in Jakarta was bombed, within 24 hours three
people had uploaded photographs from the site of the bombing. And this was
when Flickr only had 60,000 users. Three of them were in Jakarta with cameras,
Catarina Fake 261
near the embassy, took photos, uploaded them and tagged them Jakarta. So it
was emergent behavior.
The other thing that was happening was that people were creating groups
for collaborative creativity and this was a completely different behavior for
people. Photographs were being used in a completely different way. The bestknown
group of this kind is the Squared Circle group, in which people take a
photograph of something circular, and then crop it to a square. It’s incredibly
beautiful to watch in a slide show, as suns and manhole covers and dandelion
globes melt into each other. People have made all kinds of creative groups, and
giving people a forum and an audience for their creativity is a big part of Flickr.
Back when photographs were really expensive, they were like these iconic
photographs. For example, my grandparents—there’s a picture of them that
was taken in a studio. It’s very posed and it is this special photographic event. As
cameras became more and more distributed, you would take photographs at
weddings, birthdays, or events. But then digital photography really changed
that because photos are totally inexpensive. You can take hundreds of photos

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