A little while back, a friend of Caterina Fake's split up with her boyfriend. And what was worse, she told Fake, her ex was rubbing salt into the wounds by uploading pictures of himself having a great time at parties on Flickr, the website Fake set up with her husband Stewart Butterfield. The story illustrates the way that in the space of barely two years the photosharing website has become a part of everyday online life for millions of people . Every day more than a million photographs are uploaded to the site joining 250m other sunsets, seascapes, cheesy grins and just about everything in between.
For a whole generation, Flickr has become simply what you do with your pictures. The result is that Flickr has evolved into a giant, constantly updated snapshot of the planet. This is not what the couple had in mind when they began developing a so-called 'massively multiplayer online game' in 2002. But when their programmers developed photo-sharing software as part of the game, the couple decided it might be a business in its own right. 'We kind of stumbled into a good thing, ' Butterfield says.
Barely a year after launching Flickr, Fake and Butterfield sold it to Yahoo, reportedly for more than $30m. They are constantly surprised by the ways in which the site has been shaped by its users. 'We initially had a feature called groups where you could form groups around interests, ' Fake says. 'We anticipated it would be used for things like high school reunions, weddings, birth of a baby , conceivably nature photography ; but people made these groups around fascinating subjects we would never have thought of; made groups for just art projects. There's a group called 'What's in my bag? ', where people will take everything out of their bag and, like, spread it over the floor and label each of the items and tell a little story about it.'
What is web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is like a return to the web's roots. When everyone first got to be online, the thing that was really magical about it was that you could suddenly have these conversations with Danish Borghese scholars in the middle of the night because they happened to be online. What's changed is expanding on that theme of communication and personal publishing and making it available to millions of people who don't have technical skills . '
What is your big idea?
The photo-sharing sites that existed had as their paradign photo albums . Flickr came along and had the idea you no longer had an album, you had a photo stream.
What is the next big thing?
You're going to start seeing much more of the web off the web. Things that are not intended to be consumed on the web but work on your mobile devices, on your PDAs, transportable with you everywhere. The web will be something you return to to do the heavy lifting of your computation, but for the most part you're going to have very light devices.