Flickr Apocalypse: Entrepreneurial team vision killed by the moribund Yahoo

A pioneering team that transcends the times and is brutally strangled by a big company-misses social opportunities, fail mobile markets, and Flickr's decline should be a warning to all entrepreneurs.

If you want to list the popular products that have been bought down by big companies, Flickr must be on top. The work of the landmark entrepreneurial team is now increasingly marginalized, with ordinary users flocking to new photo-sharing services and social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, and even path, and professional users are moving to more refined, 500px Easier to use and cheaper professional photo storage services. Even users who simply want to store photos have more choices, such as Dropbox,skydrive and Google Drive.

From the experience of Flickr being acquired, we can see the unfortunate situation of the small team being bought in the old company such as Yahoo, and the tragic consequences of missing the opportunity again and again.

Lose Yourself

Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake are a couple entrepreneurs whose project was initially a game, and Flickr is a photo-sharing service in the game. The couple who have a clear idea of the future of Web services quickly realise that a product that shares photos online is more promising than a game. They began to do their best to complete Flickr's online photo-sharing service. It was in 2003, when most people were unaware that photos could be shared online.

Soon after Flickr was released, the couple sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Like most newly acquired startups, Flickr looked promising. But the Flickr team soon found itself forced to focus on integration services rather than continuous innovation, which put a huge risk on its future.

At the time, the real value of Flickr was the large number of properly categorized, tagged photos uploaded by its user community, a valuable database resource. But Yahoo is concerned about the huge database itself, not the users who have completed and expanded the data. So instead of developing new features to further expand the user community, Yahoo has set a strict integration plan for the Flickr team to incorporate valuable photo data from Flickr into all of Yahoo's services. The Flickr team had to spend a lot of human and financial resources to meet the tough demands of Yahoo, and there was no more resource to innovate.

Even more brutal, because Flickr's team can contribute far less than the rest of Yahoo's major services (Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, etc.), the resources available to Flickr's team are scarce, The lack of resources has led to the inability of the Flickr team to develop new features beyond the completion of the integration process to attract users to expand their communities, while the inability of the user community to grow means that they cannot contribute more revenue and cannot get more resources without contributing more. There was a dead loop, and the Flickr team was unable to develop and grow its products effectively.

In this resource-poor predicament, the Flickr team has to cancel out most of the new features to adapt to the new trend of the plan. Flickr has missed a wave of waves, no way to expand from the image field to the video field, so YouTube has grown up, and there is no way to further strengthen the building on the photo sharing on the social relationship, watching the success of Facebook step by step; Flickr can only stay in the old areas of photo storage and sharing, and soon after a number of emerging services, such as Instagram, have been kicked out of Flickr from its traditional turf.

Missing out on social opportunities

In fact, the real value of Flickr is not the behavior of photo sharing, but the social relationships that are built on photo-sharing behavior. In an age when most people don't yet know what a social network is, Flickr has built a social network of users based on photo sharing.

Flickr is also the first product to practice the concept of user circles, the relationship between users and users is not only traditional friends/not friends, such as a user can put another user in the "family" group without the need to add friends. Users can set photos as "private" only for their own viewing, can also be shared with the designated one or two users, but also in accordance with the different groups to share, such flexible settings to a large extent encouraged users to share, comment and interaction, achieved good results.

At the time, however, Yahoo had no intention at all at the time, Yahoo bought these services, in fact, for another ridiculous reason-at that time, Yahoo has just been Google from the search engine service in the position of the boss to squeeze down, the company's top executives try to consolidate more resources to regain this position.

So the reason Yahoo buys Flickr is not that Flickr has good social relationships and user stickiness, but that the Flickr database has plenty of photo resources that are properly categorized, tagged, commented on and circled by users. Such information as classifications, tags, and annotations is easily indexed so that Yahoo's search engine's index range and resources will be greatly enhanced after the acquisition of Flcikr. Yahoo buys Flickr not for the user community, but for the performance of its search engine to beat Google by using Flickr's data.

Flickr was the leader in the social networking arena. Facebook was also confined to university campuses and was delayed in providing photo-sharing services because of Mark Zuckerberg's own objections. The information that is grouped on Flickr, circled, tagged, and commented can be used to organize and build social networks. Sadly, the full value of Flickr for outdated Yahoo is that it can use its database to improve search.

Many in the Flickr team and within Yahoo have long been aware of Facebook's social prospects and values, and have repeatedly warned that Yahoo will never be socially available once Facebook jumps out of college to serve the entire community. But it wasn't until 2008 that Yahoo became aware of the value of social networking, but Facebook was already strong.