FAW #19: Caterina Fake of Flickr
No surprise: they started building the wrong thing
Flickr was no different from the rest of the FAW stories in that they started building something completely different and an offshoot of that became the product that caught on. Co-founders Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon began building an online game called “Game Neverending” in which players formed chat groups and interacted via instant messenger. When they added a feature that allowed players to share and discuss photos, the feature became the focal point and the game was forgotten. They decided to put game development on hold and focus on what the users were clamoring for which was enhancements around the photo sharing feature. They spun off this feature into a standalone web product called “Flickr.”
What made it tip
Fake says, “Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at. We built it really fast; we had a lot of the technology already from the game but we built the first instance of Flickr in eight weeks…The response was positive but it didn’t end up being a compelling product mainly because it was a feature. It had a critical mass problem…It still grew, slowly. But it really started getting traction when we added the ability to put your photographs on a web page.” “Social networking got people used to this idea that they could make an online digital identity…And social networking as social networking pretty briskly showed itself to be a fairly pointless activity…But when you tied it to a very specific, very connective activity like photo sharing, it really flourished.” Flickr exposed an API that further opened up their service and allowed developers to create add-on components and offerings that directly tied into the Flickr back end. This further strengthened their position.
Only made possible by their naïveté
Had the founders been more thorough in doing market research, they might have tainted their creative approach to Flickr and imitated the existing photo sharing sites. Fake says, “This is weird, but one of the things that enabled us to innovate within this space was that we hadn’t done our research…We were naive and optimistic. What we did was just start building stuff. And I think if we had sat down and done the research, we would have looked at the companies that had actually made businesses in this area, like Ofoto, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Basically their model was that photo sharing was a loss leader for photo finishing services…Photo sharing wasn’t seen as a valuable enough activity that people would pay for that itself. So I think that our naïveté was what made the whole thing possible.”
In the same vein, we’ve purposely kept our engineers from using the other virtual appliances on the market so as not to taint their idea of how to best deliver the experience. In the same effect of “seeing the movie before reading the book” in that it makes an indelible mark on your imagination and your ability to form your own vision. This has been a good strategy for us thus far as we’ve come up with some innovative ways to think about the problem of delivering pre-packaged applications. Had we done thorough analysis of everything on the market and exposed our engineers to the designs, our engineers surely would have been limited their ability to think creatively about the problem and JumpBox would not have the revolutionary design that it does.
Emergent behavior via tagging
Like del.icio.us, Flickr employed the concept of “tagging” for organizing one’s photos. Tagging produces interesting results because people, in the pursuit of their own self interests for organizing their photos, will use similar tags. If the photos are public this yields a unique taxonomy across users of what’s important to people. There are interesting situations that emerge. An example Fake referenced in the interview: “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 Atalanta, 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.” Other eccentric, random groups like “Squared Circle” emerged where people would frame a circular object and crop it into a square photo. Viewed as a slide show it would produce a strange visual effect to see the transition between these objects. Most photo sharing apps had been private with the ability to expose photos to friends but they found that people when given the opportunity we’re happy to expose their photos publicly.
The perfect storm of market trends
Flickr had perfect timing to intersect several important market trends. Fake says, “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.” The moons were in alignment and the scene was primed for the emergence of a service like Flickr that allowed people to manage their photos and publish them to their blogs. I’ve been using Flickr myself for the past two years as the sole mechanism for managing my photos. For many of my photos I don’t have a local copy - everything resides on Flickr. When a company is able to entrench themselves this deeply with so many people relying upon their services for something as personal and important as your authoritative photo album, they win.
Likewise it’s our hope with JumpBox to provide applications that allow people to collaborate and manage their important data in such an easy way that they come to rely deeply upon the JumpBox offering.
Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for an undisclosed sum. Yahoo recently announced the abandonment of their Yahoo Photos service in order to focus fully on Flickr as their main photo product. Flickr embodies many qualities of the Web 2.0 revolution and is frequently used in conversation as the poster child for a Web 2.0 startup.