March 16th, 2011

Former Flickr Product Chief Lands At Bitly

Flickr’s recently departed product chief Matthew Rothenberg is landing in a new job in New York City. He was just hired by bitly to become its new VP of Product. He will be moving from California. Score another one for the New York startup scene.

Rothenberg’s decision to leave Flickr, which he says has more to do with personal reasons, is nevertheless seen as yet another sign that Flickr is… → Read More

March 14th, 2011

Flickr Burning As Yahoo Fiddles: Head Of Service Walks Away

When you ask Yahoo who is in charge of Flickr, they always point to one man: Matthew Rothenberg. Well, technically, there are people at Yahoo above him in charge of the group of products that Flickr is in (Applications Division). But it’s Rothenberg, as head of product, who they’ll tell you is leading the day to day.

Not anymore.

Rothenberg is out as head of product for Flickr. He tweeted the… → Read More

March 11th, 2011

Flickr Confirms Taking Down Egyptian Blogger's Photos, Cites Community Guidelines Violation

Last weekend Egyptian protestors broke into Amn al Dowla, the Cairo headquarters for the Egyptian security agency, and removed a “treasure trove” of video disks, hard disks and CDs with government documents from the Mubarak era.

Egyptian blogger Hossam Arabway came into possession of a CD from the raid and has been uploading a set of Secret Service officer pics to Flickr for the past week. → Read More

February 20th, 2011

Yahoo Engineer Complains About Lack Of Innovation At Yahoo

Right now Yahoo engineer Jeremy Johnstone is my hero. Frustrated with with Flickr’s lack of HTML5 support on the web, Johnstone — whose position is currently “Technical Yahoo!” on the Yahoo For Good team — has decided to take his employer to task, where else? In his Flickr stream.

Earlier today Johnstone posted the above image, with the following barb.
“No Flickr, you have it wrong. I don’t→ Read More

February 2nd, 2011

Flickr Accidentally Wipes Out Account: Five Years And 4,000 Photos Down The Drain

Yahoo’s Flickr may have another PR nightmare on their hands. IT architect and Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm couldn’t log on to his 5-year old account yesterday, and when he asked the Flickr team about this issue they flat out told him they had accidentally flushed his entire account, and the 4,000 photos that were in it, straight down the drain.

Apparently Wilhelm reported a Flickr user with an… → Read More

December 27th, 2010

Flicksquare Sends Your Foursquare Check-In Photos To Flickr

Inspired by a tweet from First Round Capital VC Charlie O’Donnell (“Can someone hack a Foursquare app that cc’s my checkin photos to Flickr?”), developer Benny Wong has created Flicksquare, an app that takes advantage of Foursquare’s recent enabling of photo check-in features, allowing you to also send your Foursquare photos to Flickr.

While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr… → Read More

December 25th, 2010

Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn't. Here's Why.

Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team, where his role as “Architect” was supposedly “vital” to the service. So who better to answer questions about Flickr than Elliott-McCrea (who is now the VP of… → Read More

December 17th, 2010

Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them

It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a… → Read More

December 15th, 2010

2010's iPad App Of The Year, Flipboard, Solidifies Its Crown With Massive Update

Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “App of the Year” award. The winner? Flipboard. The social magazine app launched in July with some glowing reviews and since then, a few small updates have made it even better. But the update they’re releasing today makes it a lot better. So much so that if Flipboard was… → Read More

October 27th, 2010

Compete Top 50: Bing And Ask Rise – MySpace, MapQuest And Flickr Fall

Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).

Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as… → Read More

September 18th, 2010

Flickr Hits Its 5 Billionth Photo, And Here It Is

According to Media Culpa a blog that apparently obsessively tracks these things, photo-sharing site Flickr has hit the 5 billionth photo milestone today with the above, uploaded  by Flickr  user yeoaaron. Media culpa blogger Hans Kullin also points out that Flickr has been growing at about 1 billion photos per year, over the past 3 years, eclipsed in market share by social giant Facebook which… → Read More

September 15th, 2010

Stipple Lets You Tag Friends In Photos, Even If You Post Them On Your Own Site

We’re all pretty familiar with tagging people on sites like Facebook and Flickr. It’s a great way to let the people who are in the pictures know you’ve uploaded shots of them, and it’s also a good way for others to see who the persons are in the photos they’re looking at.

But what if you’d rather steer clear of the walled gardens of the Web and upload photos to your own website or blog? Wouldn’t… → Read More

August 27th, 2010

Zuckerberg: Facebook Photos Used 5 Or 6 Times More Than Competitors — Combined

Yesterday, Facebook held a developer’s garage event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. To kick things off, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to talk a bit about the history of Facebook. Notably, he focused on Facebook Photos as being a key catalyst that led to everything the social network is today.

He noted that when they launched the product, they didn’t have all of the features that their… → Read More

July 31st, 2010

The Flickr Bogan-Martin Award For "Media Overreaction"

One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I’m not sure why, I think the award is fun.

So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: “The→ Read More

July 20th, 2010

Flickr Awards This Year's Grant-Pattishall Award

I have to say that before today I’d never heard of the Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” But today they awarded it to Daniel Bogan, and he has been added to the list.

What did Bogan do to break Flickr? We’re hoping to find out soon enough. Comments and tips with more information are appreciated. → Read More

July 12th, 2010

Competition for Flickr: Snapfish buys Motionbox, Posterous courts Flickr users

Snapfish, the photo sharing and printing site from Hewlett Packard, announced today that they’ve acquired the Motionbox video platform, allowing Snapfish to expand its video offering. Current Motionbox users will have their content migrated to their new Snapfish account, and the current Motionbox site will remain online until August. In related news, Posterous is wooing Flickr users as the latest… → Read More

June 23rd, 2010

Flickr Gets More Photogenic With A Complete Photo Page Overhaul

As many Yahoo properties continue to stumble (or worse), one that remains very dear to my heart is Flickr, the massive photo-sharing service. With over 4 billion photos and videos (and about 3 million new ones uploaded each day), it’s one Yahoo service that won’t be going away anytime soon. And luckily the company realizes that — as today they’re previewing an overhaul of the entire photo-viewing… → Read More

June 14th, 2010

Picture This: Yahoo Finally Takes Control Of Flicker.com For Flickr

As one of the most popular social sites on the planet, Flickr is also undoubtedly one of the most popular misspelled domains. Pronounced “Flicker,” Flickr decided to be all Web 2.0-cutesy with its name back in the day. That’s fine, except when someone else owns the Flicker.com domain. Yahoo, which bought Flickr in 2005, has finally done something about that — obtaining Flicker.com.

As we noted… → Read More

June 1st, 2010

The Yahoo Brain Bleed Continues. A "Vital" Flickr Architect Departs

Death. Taxes. Talented people leaving Yahoo. The certainties in life these days.

Today, yet another key employee announced he is leaving the company. Kellan Elliott-McCrea had actually been with Yahoo for over 4 years, working on Flickr the entire time. His role was officially “Flickr Architect,” but don’t let the vague title fool you. From what we hear, he was “vital” to the service, and was one… → Read More

May 15th, 2010

Central Command Turns To Twitter To Solve The Gulf Oil Spill. Uh Oh.

As you’re probably well aware, there’s a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico right now. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and then sank last month, it began dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day. By the time the oil stops leaking, it’s expected to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Yeah, it’s bad. It’s so bad, that BP and several other organizations… → Read More

March 11th, 2010

Vicarious.ly: SimpleGeo's One Location-Based Stream To Visualize Them All

As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an… → Read More

March 1st, 2010

Google: Flickr Can Keep Using Picnik. Yahoo: We Have No Comment.

Earlier today, in writing about Google buying the photo-editing service Picnik, we noted that the most interesting thing about the buy may be that Picnik is currently Flickr’s default photo editor. Upon hearing the news, we reached out to both Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) to see what it means for the future of the partnership. The responses were interesting.

Google, for its part, says… → Read More

March 1st, 2010

Google Buys Flickr Photo Editor Picnik

Google has acquired online photo editing site Picnik, according to a blog post made by the photo editing startup today. Google also announced the acquisition on its blog. The entirety of Picnik’s blog post is embedded below.Terms of the deal were not disclosed in either posts.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the post. Picnik is one of the fastest growing photo sites on the web. Picnik is… → Read More

February 22nd, 2010

The Mysterious Social Search Abyss Of 2010

Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.

At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of… → Read More

February 9th, 2010

What The Wii Did For Console Gaming, Glitch Wants To Do For MMOs. And It Just Might.

Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive.

I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. → Read More

February 9th, 2010

Tiny Speck Uncovers Glitch, A New Flash-Based Massively Multiplayer Game

Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck’s first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch.

So what is it? As we suspected, it’s an online game in the vein of Game Neverending, the gaming project that eventually became Flickr (weird, I know). It’s a Flash-based… → Read More

February 8th, 2010

Win A Mentoring Session With Founders Of Digg, Flickr, Mint, Ning, Slide Or Zynga

Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).

The raffle will take place at a private… → Read More

December 9th, 2009

Shutterfly's Wink Gives You Photobooth Pictures Without The Booth

Just a few months after Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures, they’re already busy pumping out new products. The first is Wink, an iPhone app and web app that allows you to easily turn your pictures into photobooth-esque strips of pictures.

They key to this app is that beyond your regular camera phone pictures, it gives you easy access to both your Facebook pictures (via Facebook Connect), and your… → Read More

November 12th, 2009

Flickr Outsources Printing To Snapfish

Flickr and Snapfish have struck a deal to make HP’s photo sharing site (and Flickr competitor) the go-to printing partner for the 40 million Flickr users in the US and international markets.

As Flickr’s “preferred printing partner,” Snapfish will let Flickr users to transfer, organize, and print photos, scrapbooks, and more. Yahoo says that this is the first time Flickr’s international users… → Read More

October 29th, 2009

Scoopler Digs Up Some Funding, New Features

Realtime, realtime, realtime — it’s all you seem to hear now with regard to the web. But back in May, it was just emerging as a new trend that looked poised to explode. And one company at the forefront of that was Scoopler, a Y Combinator-backed realtime search engine. Today, being ahead of the curve has paid off, as the service has just raised a seed round of funding from some big name… → Read More