New Promise What Drew Yahoo To Flickr When They Already Had Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo Photos manager Will Aldrich had before denied whatever plans for merging Yahoo Photos together with Flickr. But it was in all probability non making perfect trace of piece of employment concern feel for Yahoo to instruct by 2 competing photograph sharing websites nether the same umbrella.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield today informed export Yahoo photos to Photobucket or Shutterfly. And like Picasa together with PhotoBucket, video sharing is coming together Flickr soon.

Techtribe founder Rohit Agarwal together with journalist Patricia Brown, where they receive got interviews together with success stories of Silicon Valley veterans similar investor Ram Shriram of Google, Ashish Gupta of Junglee, Subrah Iyer of WebEx together with many to a greater extent than entrepreneurs.

Here's an excerpt from the same book, using the electrical flow illustration of Flickr, that suggests "timing" tin give notice play a crucial operate inward the success of a company. Makes perfect sense.

Time to market, Be a tendency spotter

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr, a Vancouver, British Columbia based society that lets users upload digital pictures from computers together with cameras, together with adapt their photos into albums together with include them inward blogs together with other postings. Timing was critical inward this acquisition for a lay out of reasons, says Bradley Horowitz, VP of production strategy at Yahoo, together with the primary coordinator of the acquisition.

Yahoo already had the world's nearly successful online photograph site inward 2005. But in that location are something Yahoo saw inward a modest society of precisely a dozen people: Their mightiness to construct a community - or ecosystem - or then the concept of photography was scalable. Flickr recognized the novel keywords - social networking, interaction, together with ubiquitous broadband. The Flickr founders only connected the dots inward a timely fashion.

Yahoo's Horowitz says in that location were iv specific factors that drew him to Flickr:

1. User Generated Content - This was non novel to Yahoo. Yahoo had been soliciting user generated content through Geocities for years - but it had non generated the volume appeal that was driving the Flickr buzz.

2. User Annotated Content - Although Yahoo had billions of photos upwards inward its department called Yahoo Photos, nearly of them didn't receive got "metadata" built or then them. In essence, Yahoo created a huge digital shoebox alongside billions of people's photos, piece Flickr offered users the mightiness to organized their photos inward a sophisticated together with intuitive agency using tagging technologies. Flickr made it much easier for mutual people to add together metadata to the photos. As a result, roughly 85 pct of the photos inward Flickr were tagged or annotated alongside some human entered metadata.

3. Community Distribution - Following the open-source model, Flickr encourage its members to part photos amid its community. Yahoo together with other companies at the fourth dimension went to extraordinary lengths to forestall people from using the photos that lived on its servers exterior the context of the Yahoo! environment. The Flickr model turned Yahoo's trace of piece of employment concern model on its head. Instead of positioning Yahoo equally the finish site for these images, Flickr allowed Yahoo to pay for the storage together with bandwidth, piece encourage third-party sites - mainly bloggers - to utilization that content. Tens of thousands of bloggers began to utilization Flickr equally their imaging backbone, Horowitz says. This drove upwards awareness together with dependency on the Yahoo site afterwards the Flickr acquisition.

4. Platform Distribution - Flickr delivered a corking end-user service. But it besides delivered the services together with facilities that allowed the community of developers to maintain enhancing their ain services. In effect, they had developers that were non on the payroll edifice enhancements - similar the Flickr Macintosh coupler - at no cost to Yahoo!.


Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake together with Stewart Butterfield developed an ecosystem that was possible alone because of specific trends occurring inward the marketplace at the fourth dimension of their innovative thinking process. Flickr's innovators created an environs inward which millions of people contributed together with distributed photos piece a combination of Flickr's internal squad together with external collaborators created novel offerings.

"That's the leverage you lot instruct when accept a conduct chances together with trust that people are creative, together with trust inward the thought that many people tin give notice create to a greater extent than than precisely a few," Horowitz says.

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