March 05, 2006
Flickr History
Learn how Flickr started. Like most innovations in life, they aren't planned. They just happen.
Caterina Fake knew she was onto something when one of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based online game start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing. "It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says. Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site — now owned by Internet giant Yahoo — has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.
In 2000, he happened to meet her at a San Francisco party, where she declined his request for a date, instead leaving with her then-beau Evan Williams, a co-creator of Google's Blogger. Six months later, Butterfield read on a blog that she'd broken up with Williams. He arranged to return to San Francisco and try his luck again. This time, he invited her to British Columbia to go skiing, and she said yes. On the slopes, he proposed they try creating a website together. The rest, as they say, is history.
