Laying off George

Re:Laying off George by nostrademons on Wednesday December 17, 2008 @11:17AM (#401063)

Missing the point. Sites that have been technologically equivalent or better than Flickr have been around since the first dot-com boom. The genius of Flickr was in building a community around it.

It's really easy for technophiles to say "Oh, I could build that in a week", and usually they can. The problem is, nobody will use it. Building a community is really fricking hard - it's the sort of task where everyone says "Oh, I can do that" up until they actually try it and then find out that there's a lot of subtlety to it they've completely missed.

Same goes for Reddit, and Twitter. Those are two other sites that are cloneable in a weekend, but nobody will use your clone.

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Re:Laying off George by whatusername on Wednesday December 17, 2008 @05:37PM (#401554)

But they've lost everyone but the photographers to facebook.

The combination of the news feed and tagging people in photos (and having them show up in the news feed!) is facebooks secret sauce

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Re:Laying off George by gaius on Thursday December 18, 2008 @06:07AM (#402021)

Flickr occupies a weird space between photo.net (which is almost all photographers) and Facebook (people who take photos of each other). It may be great for photo-hosting, but no-one wants that in a vaccuum.

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Re:Laying off George by mynameishere on Wednesday December 17, 2008 @06:20PM (#401589)

I'm keeping my comments related only to the technical side of it. Obviously, flickr is a great business success for many other reasons.

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