Flickr Apocalypse: Entrepreneurial team vision killed by Yahoo

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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.

The fiasco of the mobile market

If Yahoo is to let Flickr miss the social-networking trend is an understandable strategic mistake, then in the mobile market performance is a complete fiasco. Flickr's performance in the mobile platform era has been extremely bad, leading to its eventual marginalization.

Flickr is in fact not too late to start the mobile market. As early as 2006, Flickr had already started to offer a nice, mobile version of the interface, when the iphone and Android were not there yet. The usability of this mobile website is very good, and it has a good display effect on all kinds of smart and non smart phones that are popular at that time. But it must be admitted that the mobile version is still subject to the mobile browser function at the time, not enough to meet a lot of basic needs. For example, you can not upload photos directly from the phone, users want to upload photos can only be sent by the way mail.

2008, the IOS App Store on-line, the Android device also began to appear gradually, the importance of mobile phone application began to slowly appear. Users do not want to open the camera to take photos first, then open the photo editing software to decorate the photos, and then send the photos via email to Flickr. What users need is a mobile-side tool that can be photographed, beautified, and shared instantly. The Flickr team is very knowledgeable about this trend, but has been slow to react. Because--within Yahoo, they don't have the authority to do their own mobile clients.

At that time Yahoo was responsible for the mobile strategy of the people is Marco Boerries, this is a gifted teenager, 16 years old has developed a set of word processing tools, and eventually developed into an office suite StarOffice.

Marco Boerries's mobile strategy is called "Networked Living" (Connected life). In his vision, all the data, such as contacts, photos, music, documents, and emails, can be seamlessly synchronized between desktop and mobile devices, almost exactly the same as the cloud service ideas of the big companies today.

But Marco Boerries's cloud-sync vision was too advanced at the time, and he himself was a bigot. The pace of the strategy has been slow and eventually aborted, and Flickr's mobile apps have been delayed. Kellan Elliot-mccrea, former Flickr's chief architect, recalls on Quora:

Marco Boerries was the most hated Yahoo executive at the time. The frustration of the Flickr team was that they had been trying to develop mobile apps as early as 2006, but these efforts were ruthlessly stifled. ”

It was not until September 2009 that the first official Flickr app was slow to stand in the apps Store, and the users rated it poorly. The Flickr app was not able to upload multiple photos at one time, automatically reducing the resolution of photos to 450x600, uploading photos of EXIF information, and expecting users to blow, as one user wrote in the App Store Evaluation: " The official Flickr app is the worst of all apps that can upload photos to Flickr. Instead of wasting time downloading such crappy apps, you might as well continue posting photos in e-mail. ”

At the same time, the official Flickr app has no way to deal with the photos directly, and almost all of the camera applications can be scaled and decorated easily. Soon after, one can take photos, can automatically add filters, can also quickly upload applications appear and achieved great success, the application of the name is called Instagram.

And Flickr has become a total loser in the Mobile world. So far, Flickr has only ranked 64th in the App Store's list of camera apps.

After changing the CEO and cutting off a lot of items, Yahoo is starting to focus on Flickr again, but it's too late. Flickr's active users are now far away. Many people's Flickr updates are only Instagram photos that are automatically synchronized, and they are uploading more and more photos on Facebook, path and 500px. Flickr is like the old photo album under the bed, you will occasionally take out to flip, aftertaste of their early happy time, issued some "passes, around!" Sigh. Then, you close the album, take out the mobile phone, open is Instagram.