The Flickr Story

An Inc. interview of how Flickr did it. Excerpt:

Fake: And then he got up and went to the bathroom and got sick. And we arrived, and we're racing down the Van Wyck Expressway in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and he made the cabby pull over and just rolled down his window and threw up. And then we arrived at the hotel, and the doorman at the hotel opens up the door to the car, and he throws up again, right on the carpet. It was terrible. And then he stays up all night. I fall asleep. I wake up and he's like, "I've got a great idea. Let's make a photo-sharing site." And that was the impetus.

Butterfield: The front end of the game was done. You could drag objects around, pick things up. You could manage inventory, send instant messages to people, drag items onto people's names to give them things. The new idea was to replace all the objects of the game with photos, so you have this real-time interaction around photos.