From ETCon 2004, Cory Doctorow on Flickr , via Tom Coates:
(Cory) Flickr is a social image-sharing application: it's a mechanism for creating ad-hoc chats, using a drag-and-drop GUI interface that lives inside your browser, and share images from peer-to-peer and within conversational groups. I've beta-tested this at various points and at each time I've been struck by Ludicorp's amazing combination of utilitarian, usable interface aesthetic and genuinely witty whimsy. As Ben Ceivgny, a developer on the project, said:(Tom) I'm not a Ludicorp adviser, but I have been beta-testing it. It's bloody good fun and I highly recommend it. Much much better than Orkut - introducing Flickr!We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world.
sylloge, We ship! (13.2.2004):
The #1 priority for me is to improve the "out of the box" experience for people using Flickr. We aren't doing a big launch push until we make that a little better. It is too hard to figure out how to use, even though everything is easy-as-heck drag and drop. But people aren't expecting drag and drop. When I demo it, people REALLY, get it. I worry that the people stumbling in will just stumble out again without understanding what is going on. Nevertheless, it is already awesome!
