Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello (04 Aug 2005) JJG: That’s interesting. I would have thought that people would be most interested in their own little world – themselves, their friends, their family. But what happened was that once they got hooked on the site on that small scale, people wanted to see that big picture. They wanted to feel like participants in this larger community. EC: Yeah, that was definitely a surprise to us. Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends. And people certainly use it in different ways. I primarily use it to share photos with my friends and family, and most of my photos are restricted so that only people I’ve said are my friends and family can view them. But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now. Article URL: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php Read 50 more articles from Adaptive Path sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Using Film-Making Techniques to Synthesize Compelling Video Shows from Consumer Photographs     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy