Flickr, the popular photo sharing site widely considered a pioneer of Web 2.0, celebrated its third birthday on March 3rd 2007. The so-called 'Flickr 333' birthday party held in San Francisco last Saturday reunited photo fans from all over the world.Flickr was officially launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, a Canada-based company which also developed Game Neverending, a multiplayer computer game. In its early days, Flickr was a successful photo sharing site with a clean layout and user friendly design. However, since Yahoo! bought Ludicorp in 2004, Flickr's success can largely be attributed to the integration of social communities and networks, as well as the implementation of various social features that helped spread the site's now far reaching web presence.
More than 70% of Flickr users attach tags with keywords to their photos, thus making them searchable to other users. A tag is a keyword or key phrase related to the image and a form of metadata that will make it easier to classify each photo on a certain category. Flickr was one of the first websites that heavily promoted the use of tags by featuring tag clouds, a group of tags which highlighted the most common tags used recently in a larger font.
Flickr has successfully created virtual networks of users by facilitating the sharing of photos with friends, family or other anonymous users. Virtual groups in Flickr can also promote ideas and collaborate with each other.
Additionally, Flickr also provides a range of tools that enable the easy integration of pictures with many blogging sties, such as Livejournal, Blogger or Typepad to name a few. Its open source format enables developers to create their own applications using the Flickr API, which is fully documented.
Flickr's success in the burgeoning sphere of social networking on the web has had a big impact on the fortunes of its owner, Yahoo!, and is helping the search engine combat competition from market leaders, Google, by promoting social network tools and applications.
