I joined Flickr yesterday. It’s just great. I was reading an interesting Guardian interview with Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and found the following interesting/amusing quote:
“We have quite a large proportion of the Japanese tech-geek community, and a lot of people in the United Arab Emirates taking pictures of their cars and Starbucks in Dubai. There’s obviously a much bigger opportunity for us. One of the things we’re waiting for is for the interface to stabilise, and I’m sure there are a lot of culture-specific alterations we’ll have to make.”
Comments
One response to “Flickr, Cars, Starbucks and and Dubai :)”
Actually, that’s quite interesting, but I must say I’m surprised at Butterfield’s comment. Of course, he’s quite right, at least about the UAE thing as I haven’t seen much of the Japanese tech-geeks. I myself can’t help but be fascinated at the rate of Flickr spreading in the UAE. Most of the pictures are nothing special, basically teenagers fooling around with expensive cameras and taking shots of random stuff like teddy bears, their bedrooms, and their cars, but aside from that, there are some excellent shots.
I’m pretty active on Flickr, and I noticed the UAE thing almost straight away. They sort of form a cult- they have their own groups, their own “idea” of photoblogging, and they even all do that whole signing photos deal. Say, you’d find several groups entitled “UAE Lovers”, “UAE Fans”, “UAE Beauty”, and they’d have over a 100 members(that join all the UAE groups) and around 40 photographs(pooled into all the UAE groups). I’m not critisizing this phenomena, because this is what selfpublishing is all about, you get into the minds of the people and learn more about how differet classes in certain countries think.