MercuryNews.com: Yahoo Gets Personal

MercuryNews.com | 11/20/2005 | Yahoo gets personal: The Mercury News (for a registration password go to bugmenot) is out with yet another article on the flickrization that is going on at Yahoo! Caterina and Stewart are reported to be evangalizing the power of social networking to all of Yahoo!'s various departments:

"But Flickr layered on key features that set it apart from the Ofotos and Shutterflys of the world. For starters, the assumption of the Flickr service is that you want your photos to be public. People comment on each other's photos, even those of strangers, using the digital images as a communal bond. This approach taps directly into the same cultural instinct that drives blogging -- the urge to create and share content online.

Tagging is another important piece of the Flickr puzzle. People can add keywords that describe the photos' content, making them instantly searchable and groupable. Motorcycle enthusiasts could find 5,048 photos tagged ``motorcycles'' last week.

Tagging allows Internet users to cluster content into their own categories, collectively building a grass-roots index of the Web. And tags can be the glue that binds groups of people together. Flickr users, for example, will often create tags around certain events, offering a way for attendees to collectively organize their photos.

The concepts that form the core of Flickr -- tagging, sharing and community -- are spreading through Yahoo's many departments. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, visited with most Yahoo departments to understand how a Flickr approach might help their products by involving users more. It's what Yahoo executives are now calling the ``Flickrization of Yahoo.''"