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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Here's the real link (question to poster: Why did you link to an unnecessary reference?)

http://george08.blogspot.com/2008/12/not-quite-what-i-had-in...

My comment: Congratulations to the affected. A website that does little besides arranging "img" elements is fundamentally lame. I was hit in the 2001 blowout, and it was probably the best thing that could have happened. Find something good.....

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"... (flickr) A website that does little besides arranging "img" elements is fundamentally lame ..."

That isn't an accurate description of what flickr does. The kinds of problems they work on are a lot more complicated than arranging images.

And even if it weren't much more technically complex than that, which I'm sure it is, a product is much more than the sum of the technologies behind it.

One of the most ubiquitous inventions I've seen develop in my lifetime is luggage on wheels. The technology is trivial (it's a combination of two simple things that have existed for centuries) but somehow it didn't get invented until the late '80s/early '90s. Now you wouldn't buy a suitcase without it, and it makes travel infinitely more pleasant.

Good point. Better yet, try a suit case with 4 wheels (mine is a Samsonite). I like it so much I would volunteer as a spokesman.

I prefer the "only take carry-on luggage" approach.

This does require being able to travel quite light though - most of my trips are 1 week or less at a conference so I only take clothes, laptop and assorted chargers.

Me too, but even my carry-on has wheels.

You don't understand the situation. Flickr was created by Ludicorp, a start-up that was acquired by Yahoo. George worked for Ludicorp. Whether you think Flickr is valuable or not is irrelevant. She was there in the beginning and now she's been fired. That sucks.

Regarding the reference, Jeffrey Zeldman is widely and well respected. The reference is notable because it provides context into how ridiculous the situation is.

I would wager that a comment flippantly (and ignorantly) disparaging a very useful site which unleashed quite a bit of creativity everywhere, is much much lamer.

Flickr's interesting because it's a Web 2.0 darling. There was an article I read that stated that Photobucket got 7x the traffic of Flickr but Flickr got 40x the press mentions of Photobucket. Facebook now owns the online photo-hosting market. The big weakness of Flickr is that its main interaction model is between photographers - Facebook's is between photographers and people in photos.

Flickr may be a cool technology but in a business sense it's an also-ran.

What is the definition of "traffic" in this case? Page views? Regardless, "traffic" is not a basis for determining the value or even the popularity of a site.

Not sure why people are defending flickr. There are lots of equivilent websites, and have been long before it ever existed. I stand by my comment: It's fundamentally lame. If I was a CS professor, I would have sophmores make a clone of it for a 2-week project. Just because it's the most popular in its class doesn't mean it transcends the extreme simplicity of said class.

Frankly, I don't even like it. Whose aesthetic ideal is responsible for the decision to show pictures at a size other than the maximum (up to a practical limit)? Show me the full-sized picture. Just seems obvious.

What exactly does this have:

http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/in/photostream/

That this doesn't:

http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/sizes/o/in/photost...

(Obviously, you could put the various widgets next to and below the above picture with plenty of space to spare.)

Missing the point. Sites that have been technologically equivalent or better than Flickr have been around since the first dot-com boom. The genius of Flickr was in building a community around it.

It's really easy for technophiles to say "Oh, I could build that in a week", and usually they can. The problem is, nobody will use it. Building a community is really fricking hard - it's the sort of task where everyone says "Oh, I can do that" up until they actually try it and then find out that there's a lot of subtlety to it they've completely missed.

Same goes for Reddit, and Twitter. Those are two other sites that are cloneable in a weekend, but nobody will use your clone.

But they've lost everyone but the photographers to facebook.

The combination of the news feed and tagging people in photos (and having them show up in the news feed!) is facebooks secret sauce

Flickr occupies a weird space between photo.net (which is almost all photographers) and Facebook (people who take photos of each other). It may be great for photo-hosting, but no-one wants that in a vaccuum.

I'm keeping my comments related only to the technical side of it. Obviously, flickr is a great business success for many other reasons.

What does cloning some website have to do with computer science?

What does cloning some website have to do with computer science?

Two upmods. Hmm. At least two other people think your question a good one. Okay. (EDIT: Three now)

Well, websites are closely associated with many of the topics in computer science. There are, for instance, programming languages, algorithms, data structures, etc, involved in producing a website, no matter the actual content of the website. Likewise, many computer science professors have classes with names like "Software Engineering" which have large-scale projects similar to real-life projects.

Hope I cleared up the confusion.

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