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Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite.
The service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by innovative community tools, allowing photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.
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History
In February 2004, Flickr emerged out of tools built first for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web browser-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more plausible project and Game Neverending was ultimately shelved.
Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room for sharing photos; the successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map.
Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. In March 2005, both Flickr and Ludicorp were bought by Yahoo!. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States. This means all data is subject to U.S. laws1.
Organization
A screenshot of hot tags on Flickr.Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword "tags", which then can be used for image searchers to easily find images on a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags (metadata), Flickr has been repeatedly cited as an example of folksonomy applied to collections of photos. Flickr was also one of the first sites to implement tag clouds.
Access control
The website provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. Privacy settings for each photo can be private, viewable by friends/family or public. Privacy settings can also be decided by adding photographs from a users pool to a "group." If a group is private then all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public then effectively the photo becomes public also. A "contact list" is provided which can be used to control image access to a specific set of users, in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.
Many of its users allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos. By default, other users can leave comments about any image they have permission to view, and in some cases can add to the list of tags associated with an image.
Licensing
Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons attribution-based and minor content-control licenses. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.
Interaction and compatibility
Its functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds, and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services.
The core functionality of the site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, allowing for wide usability among platforms and browsers. One non-HTML but non-essential component of the site, Organizr, relies on the widely accessible Flash technology.
Images can also be submitted to the user's collection via an email interface.
As of October 2005, the site is operating in a beta test stage; however, it has been increasingly adopted, especially by the weblog community. In addition, Flickr is popular with Macintosh users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the PC/Windows architecture to work.
See Also
External links
- Flickr website
- Yahoo! actually does acquire Flickr - Official announcement
- Ludicorp corporate website
- The Great Flickr Tools Collection - Complete tools list
- Flickr Bits - A listing of tools and utilities which use the Flickr API
- flickrGraph - Visualize the relationships between Flickr users.
- Mappr website - Adds geographical information to Flickr images
- Related Tag Browser - A Flash interface that lets photos be browsed and aggregated by their tags and related tags.
- GeoBloggers - Mapping Flickr images over Google Maps.
- Quotations Book - A demonstration of the usage of Flickr's popular feed services
- ShoZu - Mobile/cell phone uploader for Flickr
Notes
- ^ An active discussion about privacy laws, access-by-country, The Patriot Act and Code 2257 can be found here