The opening chapter of our book Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide is informative in terms of showing how users of a Web 2.0 technology add monetary value to it. The Web 2.0 technology that the book uses as an example is the website Flickr. This is a photo sharing site in which users can upload photos to be shared with various communities.
The term “freemium” is introduced in this chapter. This is a term that was first introduced by venture capitalist Fred Wilson via his blog. Freemium is a term that combines the words “free” and “premium.” Flickr started as a free service but then later offered more services for a price, or premium. The majority of the users that signed up for the premium service had been users that originally subscribed to the free service. This is a way that Flickr began generating revenue by initially giving away its services.
Aside for this, I learned about metadata from this reading. Forms of metadata are tags, footnotes and annotations. These forms of metadata serve as an interpretation, highlighting or framing of the original data. The tags help users and others who just want to view photos search for them quicker. Flickr uses something called tag clusters which use dynamic analysis of the groups of tag words used together. I also learned about tag clouds which alphabetized the various tags. These tag words also show up as different sizes which are used to differentiate the popularity of the tags.
Flickr became a well known web 2.0 technology because of the timing that it originated. It became popular around the time that camera phones were becoming popular. This enabled users to be able to take photos from anywhere at any time. The book says that “in 2006, more than 1 billion photos were taken from the more than 300 million camera phones in use.” It also says that “an estimated 10% of the photos on Flickr were directly uploaded from mobile devices.
Flickr is a dynamic web 2.0 technology that uses its users to build the site. It is one of the first sites to allow users to upload photos for sharing. Because of Flickr, sites such as YouTube have been created. Flickr was a trendsetter and I expect other web 2.o technologies to follow its business model.
Ok, so I forgot my password to my old Flickr account. So I quickly put up a few pictures from my trip to D.C. that you can find here.
