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Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr

flckr

Flickr is quickly becoming one of the most popular "moblog" and photo sharing site, is it the interface? The APIs? Caterina talks about this and more!



Name, rank, serial number…(who you are).

Caterina Fake, co-founder and jill of all trades. As you know, this being a small startup I do a lot of everything: marketing, pixel pushing, strategy, product development, janitorial duties, money raising—you name it. :)

In a nutshell, what's Flickr (including cost for user, etc..).
Flickr's originality as an online photo sharing site comes from the marriage of content that users create the online community that they share their photos with…

The network creates a kind of self-organization that makes all kinds of things possible: collaborative curation, group scrapbooking, easy search, dynamically assembled galleries ? and has resulted in the best organized collection of photos in the world. Over 80% of the photos in
Flickr are public ? you can make it so only your friends or family sees your photos ? which makes all kinds of creative collaboration possible.

We also make it really easy to get your photos into Flickr, and really easy to get them out again in whatever way you like, whether that be by RSS feed, posting them to blogs, or, as some of our users have done, making dynamic screensavers built on the Flickr API.

There is a free version of Flickr, limited to 10 MB uploads a month and 100 photos displayed on Flickr; the paid version permits 1GB uploads a month, and unlimited storage (as well as unlimited photosets, no ads and other things).

Do you plan to support video in the future?
We would like to support short-form video ? like the kind of video you can take with your digital camera.

What are your favorite Flickr sites?
My personal favorite is the Squared Circle group.

It was started by a user named Striatic, and all submissions are of
something circular set in a square frame. The amazing thing is to watch
the slidehow:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/circle/pool/show

It is fascinating! You see plates of food, clocks, water towers,
airplanes that have been cut in half ? and when you watch the slide
show they fade into one another. It?s amazing. One of the things that?s
great about Flickr is you can remix your own photos with other people?s,
by forming groups or using tags.

Some other great groups are Obscure Obverse, which shows the back sides of picture frames, mirrors and other cool things; Molskinerie, which shows cool things people have done with their Moleskine notebooks; The Secret Life of Toys which has great pictures of
toys acting like people ? it?s really endless. I can, and do, spend
hours just surfing around looking at this stuff. People are so
inventive.

Tag surfing is another thing that I do. Some great tags include:
Space Invaders.
Sleeping.
Creepy.
Decay.

What digital camera do you use (it?s interesting that you can see the EXIF data, is there a most popular camera on Flickr?
I mostly use the cameraphone on my Nokia 6600. Because I always have it with me. Even though the picture quality, admittedly, leaves a lot to be desired. There *is* a most popular camera on Flickr, according to the EXIF data, and that is the Canon Powershot, though depending on how you
cluster the makes and models, the Sony Cybershot comes pretty close. We?ll see what happens after Christmas too!

Another thing to note is that no Nokia phones include EXIF data with their photos, so we don?t know about any of those.

What gadgets do you use? Tivos, which phone, etc..?
I?m not much of a gadgeteer, but I love my cameraphone so much! All those cool-weird-interesting-beautiful things that you see when you?re out in the world: you can finally save them and share them because you?re carrying the camera with you everywhere.