Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr
posted Dec 3rd 2004 12:50PM
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.
wow! a great read you guys .. and a great site that flickr is. im impressed with the features ever since i joined a few months ago.
congratulations ms. fake.
Great article but I couldn't get the "Obscure Obverse" or "Molskinerie" links to work... Tried it with Firefox and IE. Otherwise, Flickr seems like a cool site.
the link for Obscure Obverse should be:
www.flickr.com/groups/76579535@N00/
-Z
Thanks Jayvee!
And the Moleskinerie link should be:
http://flickr.com/groups/36521985904@N01/
And the link to squared circle should be http://www.flickr.com/groups/circle/
The links at Flickr aren't broken, they're just badly formed in the article. Many of the links in the article above have embedded spaces at the end, which is why they're not working.
Flickr is awesome. It's become the site I visit the most times every day, I've become re-obsessed with photography because of it, and I've met some really cool people there.
Flickr is an never-ending virtual art installation; a terrific photograph organizer, a community that makes friends out of strangers. Not just for the computer savvy, it is very user friendly. In fact it is the best designed web site I have ever seen. Visually great(I love the colours);it is great fun to move around in Flickr. Every time in I learn something more about what it does and meet yet another interesting photographer. The Flicker Blog is a daily must and praise to Caterina who never fails in calling your attention to yet another creative Flickr "event". Flickr makes it feel like you can drop in on your neighbour who always has the door and the photgraph album open for yet another fun discussion. So grab yourself a coffee, tea, latte or whatever and sit down and spend a few minutes at Flickr. Best of all, you do not have to own a digital camera to enjoy it.
I am totally hooked by flickr, it is the best community building site I have ever been involved with.
I will be going pro within a month.
Flickr is the best online photo-sharing app I have seen in my 8 years on the Internet. I went pro on day 2 of checking it out. I have replaced all my other online photo galleries with my Flickr site.
http://flickr.com/photos/blackcoil/
Caterina, by chance are you Peter Fake's daughter? If so, I worked with him. 'Hope all is well! It sounds like you are very enterprising and going places! Best wishes, Carolyn
Caterina, by chance are you Peter Fake's daughter? I worked with him. 'Hope all is well! It sounds like you are enterprising and going places!! Congratulations and all the best for your continued success!!
Caterina, are you Peter Fake's daughter?! I worked with him. 'Hope all is well!? 'Looks like you are very enterprising and talented! Very best wishes for your continued success!!!
Great to find this! (athough I had to scroll through a lot of dudes) I vote for more women geeks profiled on engadget :-)
I love flickr so much I started a webring called Blogs That Flickr. Dedicated and open to bloggers everywhere who are flickr members , that love the site.
The response has been great, as we have 84 members from all over the globe! We started April 02,2005. We have had over 1200 visits!
You can see the blogs listed here :
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=Blogs_That_Flickr;action=list
I have really enjoyed the creativity inspired by my fellow flickr members. I joined in 2004 , I have over 4,000 photos.
--Amber