(At the time, Friendster, Facebook and MySpace were getting good buzz, but you couldn’t do much with them - Facebook didn’t even add photo-sharing capabilities until October 2005.) They helped reshape the entire web, which was still figuring out how social applications should work. May 9: Tags, which allowed members to attach relevant keywords to photos - their own, or other people’s– thereby creating a massive user-generated index of images that information architect Thomas Vander Wal famously called a “folksonomy.”Īugust 27: Favorites, which, like tags, helped users tell Flickr what was popular on the service.

(From the get-go, Flickr catered to people who took pictures with their phones - one early user brought a camera phone into the delivery room to get pictures of her newborn onto Flickr A.S.A.P.) Even its name, with the missing final vowel, provided inspiration to countless other startups.Īpril 26: A version of the site designed for viewing on mobile phones. No Web 2.0 site was more important than Flickr it debuted just six days after Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, and at first, it wasn’t clear that Butterfield and Fake’s photo-sharing site wasn’t the bigger deal.

It was the whole idea.īack in 2004, the sort of rich online environment for social interaction that Flickr and other newcomers were inventing was so new that people started talking about “Web 2.0,” a term that started out sounding futuristic but soon became redundant, since its influence was everywhere. But with those sites, the online sharing was a come-on for their real business, which was selling prints of digital photos. Actually, Flickr arrived years after the first three big names in the category: Ofoto, Shutterfly and Snapfish, all of which debuted in 1999. Founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, who were married at the time, Ludicorp didn’t invent photo sharing.

Flickr images