With photo-sharing sites and storage giants like Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and Amazon, the once-dominant Flickr has lost its place. So what is Flickr now? Its chief says we’ll know in about a year.
In May 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was in New York City, standing in front of a sign that was really more of a plea:
Dear Marissa Mayer,
Please make Flickr awesome again.
♥
the internet
The slide was from dearmarissamayer.com, a website set up by a disaffected user lamenting Flickr, the photo sharing site Yahoo bought almost a decade earlier that has since largely lost its way. Flickr had deteriorated under Yahoo’s watch, much to the chagrin of its once-dominant user base.
So Mayer gathered press, employees and guests to a hotel in Times Square to acknowledge the site’s fading position on the Web, and tell them what she was doing about it.
“Flickr was awesome once,” she said. “It languished.”
“We want to make Flickr awesome again.” Her answer? A slick redesign and a terabyte of photo storage for every user, enough to hold more than 500,000 photos.
The effort marked the beginning of Flickr’s attempts at a turnaround since Mayer became CEO in 2012. Not long after the announcement, Mayer put Bernardo Hernandez, a 43 year old former Googler and native of Spain, in charge of the site.
The new redesign drew much-needed praise, but Yahoo still realizes Flickr still has a long way to go. “How do we make Flickr relevant again?” said Hernandez, Flickr’s vice president, during an interview at Yahoo offices in San Francisco. The answer will be “obvious,” he said, in about a year, after a string of product updates.
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer unveils an update to the company’s Flickr photo-sharing site. Among the changes are a redesign with larger images, the ability for users to upload full-resolution photos, and 1TB of free storage for everyone.
Source: www.cnet.com
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