Tangler recently brought up the question “why did Flickr ‘win’?”. For Tara Hunt, a big part of the answer is they have “mojo“:
“Everyone [in the Flickr team] experienced the growth from a different perspective, but I believe that they all understand that a passionate team, working together towards a similar Higher Purpose, does what it does to get wherever it is that team is going. Furthermore, I conjecture that each of them understand that all of these elements working together, combined with the environmental factors they couldn’t control contributed towards that success.“
Factors they couldn’t control? Rather, we read this to mean that Ludicorp’s passion and drive in developing Flickr created the conditions for serendipity. They were attuned to how their community was using their application and made the necessary changes to please their users. Eric Costello, Client Development Lead for Flickr, said as much in an interview with Adaptive Path, when he mentioned how they changed their initial concept of Game Neverending to better suit what their users wanted:
“It wasn’t a photo sharing site, so much as it was a place where you could go to chat and talk about photos. But none of that activity was stored in any asynchronous way – there were no Web pages that hosted the conversations people were having about photos, it was all just real-time.
We wanted to extend that into the Web, so that everything that could be done in the Flash chat environment could be done on the site itself. User feedback also drove a lot of the decisions about features. We had user forums very early on and people told us what they wanted.“
For years to come, we will be dissecting the key factors of success for Flickr and other sites. But fundamentally, we believe people love to share experiences with their family, friends, community or the whole world. The growth of photo- and video-sharing sites tells us as much.
Our goal is to help you do so by opening a space where you can create stunning multimedia scrapbooks featuring photos, videos, audio and a bunch of other creative elements. But we will be open to your suggestions on how to make this space the most welcoming, easy to use and comfortable one for all.
And the more we can help you ‘kick ass’, the better we’re doing our job.
Technorati Tags: flickr, tangler, scrapblog, serendipity, social
powered by performancing firefox
I think they won because users got passionate more than the team. The users wanted to share their experience and their photos and those users brought in more users who brought in more users and it is still going on.
I know lots of passionate teams. But some of them haven’t got a product or service that will ignite end-user love.
As you say, for many people taking photos is a social activity since the captured moment will eventually be shown to someone else, be it family, friend or even stranger. Remember slide-showing parties in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s? Flickr extended this activity online by making photo-sharing and socializing around photos much easier and more compelling than before.