The New Wisdom of the Web

Some Flickr photographers have not only become renowned among the membership, but have gotten professional gigs (Flickr shots are the basis of a recent Visa ad campaign). But the most remarkable thing about Flickr is that the willingness to post pictures publicly--so ingrained in Flickr culture that you have to opt out to avoid it--creates a panoramic effect. Fake calls it "the culture of generosity," but knows that for some people, shedding privacy like that is a stretch. But since Flickr members go along, if you want to know what a distant city looks like from the ground, the site will provide you the views. When news happens anywhere in the world, it's common for the first photographs not to be sent via news wire, but posted to a Flickr site. (This phenomenon first occurred during the September 2004 Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta; at that time Flickr had only 60,00 users, but three people posted shots of the devastation.) That's why Butterfield calls Flickr "the eyes of the world," and says that eventually, with geographical tagging, its users will easily be able to see photos instantly "not just of world events, but somebody wiping out on their bike down the street from you."

Flickr was a good business, too, as many users chose to pay the $25-a-year fee for unlimited photo storage and relief from advertising on the site. But that's not why Yahoo bought it for an estimated $35 million. "With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing," says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. "That's a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something."

The Living Web means that there may be plenty of opportunities to become the next Flickr, and hundreds of start-ups are trying to do just that. At Tim O'Reilly's recent Emerging Technology Conference, it seemed that 1,200 people had signed on to some collectively generated business plan: starting a company in a spare bedroom, outsourcing the programming to some Indian company they found on the Web, getting content from users and then having users organize the content by tagging, pocketing money from Google ads placed on the Web site and, finally, selling the company to Yahoo. (Bad news: Yahoo's Horowitz admits, "We can't buy everyone.") The lock-step fervor turns off some Valley veterans. "When people say to me it's a Web 2.0 application, I want to puke," says venture-capitalist Guy Kawasaki. On the other hand, he admits that plenty of the ideas make sense. "People do want to share. They want collaboration, full time. They want all that kind of stuff."

Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren't places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live.

© 2006