Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. As of November 2008[update], it claims to host more than 3 billion images.

F lickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, B.C., Canada-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr’s backend systems evolved away from the Game Neverending’s codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.

In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.

On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to “gamma”, along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site’s FAQ, the term “gamma”, rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (originally a 2GB per month limit).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that “Old Skool” members–those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition–would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.

On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size.

Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo announced that they would shut down Yahoo! Photos on September 20, 2007, after which all photos would be deleted. During the interim, users had the ability to migrate their photos to Flickr or other services (including Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Photobucket). All who migrated to Flickr were given three months of a Flickr Pro account. AT&T Internet Services customers were given a free Flickr Pro account, which originally was planned to be for the duration of the customer’s subscription to AT&T Internet Services, but AT&T has recently decided to drop the Pro account services, with most customers’ Pro accounts ending next year unless they subscribe to Flickr Pro. This generated some negative feedback amongst AT&T customers. Flickr users who do subscribe to Pro before their term runs out will be given an extra two months of the service free of charge.

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Tags: AIM, flickr, stable release, Top, Web 2.0, web service, Web-based, Yahoo!

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