Surprise! Surprise! This was really news to me. I had no idea that the widely popular photo sharing site Flickr used to be a massively multiplayer online game called The Game Neverending with the realtime photo sharing capabilities. And the fact that it’s just a year and a half old and still radically different application than it used to be when it started.
I just stumbled across the text of an interview with Flickr’s Eric Costello here - a must read for anybody building services on the web.
I think that the best thing that Flickr did was to listen to their customers. They saw the customers wanting the advanced photo sharing capabilities even when it used to be a multiplayer online game with the realtime photo sharing capabilities - and they gave the users that power. They, then, saw the demand for tags on the lines of del.icio.us and they extended that functionality to make the tags more usable, one of the strong reasons for making Flickr so popular.
Now, this interview was an eye-opener.
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[...] If you haven’t still read Kathy’s post, let me remind you again. Do yourself and this world a favor - always think about your users. That is what will differentiate you from the rest. Flickr is, probably, one of the best example of this. [...]
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