Hey guys, I hope that you’ve enjoyed all of my blog posts thus far. This post pertains to my thoughts on Flickr and some of the findings I discovered while conducting my research and how its related to the Gartner Hype Cycle. As always before we go more in-depth I want to make sure that you guys know what the Gartner Hype Cycle is. The hype cycle is a bell-curved shape graph that identifies the phases/stages that a business goes through. The cycle depicts 5 phases, innovation trigger, the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. The figure below is the 2018 Gartner Hype Cycle.
Like most companies, they have a rise and fall. No different with Flickr over the years. Flickr debut six days after Facebook in 2004 and was seen as a new era of social media and technology. From the start, it was building a community of photo lovers around the world who wanted to share images with other photo lovers, as well as thousands of special interest sub-communities. It was about storytelling. In the first few months after Flickr launched, it received many updates and began creating the features that mainly all social media platforms today. These features include tools like photo-streaming, tags, and a mobile app. “These features didn’t just shape Flickr. They helped reshape the entire web, which was still figuring out how social applications should work. (At the time, Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace were getting a good buzz, but you couldn’t do much with them — Facebook didn’t even add photo-sharing capabilities until October 2005.)” (3) Flickr definitely had reached the peak of inflated expectations at this point, since the technology was so fresh and new.
A year later, Yahoo acquired Flickr for approximately $35 million. Things seem to be going well for Flickr under the new ownership of Yahoo, for the first few years. Flickr continued to get new features and upgrades. Their acquisition later came to an end, in 2008. Flickr was never really the center of Yahoo’s social strategy and focused it’s attention elsewhere, causing Flickr to slowly fall through the cracks. “In 2008, both Fake and Butterfield left Yahoo. (As he departed, Butterfield earned additional fame by writing the best resignation letter of all time.) Flickr continued without them but didn’t exactly flourish — because Yahoo itself wasn’t flourishing. The company knew that it was engaging in an epic battle with Google, but didn’t seem to be able to articulate to anyone, including itself, what that meant for it and its properties. As it burned through CEOs like the world’s unluckiest gambler, Flickr began to fester.” (3) Til this day Flickr has still not gained its light back and is stuck in the trough of disillusionment.
“Failures in the context of work really sting and you want to come up with some narrative around them about why they’re not failures. But if you try to learn from them you can turn losses into successes.”- Butterfield
Flickr Media 