Originally published February 4 2006
Yahoo to use the key features of Flickr
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Yahoo is moving toward becoming a social media hub by using the photo-sharing capabilities of Flickr. The key features of Flickr include blog-like interaction, searchable photo labeling and more.
Professor Marc Davis has dedicated years of his life to studying how the Internet is changing people from passive Web surfers to active content creators who post their own text, video and audio online.
Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has been given the keys to perhaps the biggest real-world lab in the world --- Yahoo's vast network of Web sites and the hundreds of millions of people who use them.
As head of Yahoo's new social media research lab in Berkeley, just a brisk walk from the UC-Berkeley campus, Davis has been tasked with helping Yahoo chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of "social media" --- from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices.
The phrase now permeates the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's culture, and it is becoming one of the cornerstones of its business model.
It allows people to search the subset of Web sites that friends and acquaintances have found interesting and annotated with their thoughts and comments.
"The opinions of my friends can be an important model for discovery," said Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's director of technology development.
Most prominent was its March acquisition of Flickr, a photo-sharing site started by a husband-and-wife team in Canada.
Photo-sharing Web sites are nothing new --- Yahoo, in fact, has had a service called Yahoo Photos for years.
The tagging movement ushered in by Flickr and other sites has prompted new thinking about how the Web is organized.
Flickr users, for example, will often create tags around certain events, offering a way for attendees to collectively organize their photos.
"Increasingly, technologies are allowing people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways heretofore unimaginable."
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