Flickr is always held as an example of a 2.0 success story – which it is, but it seems for all the wrong reasons. Does anyone remember that Flickr has always charged money for their pro accounts? They were trying to make a profit from their site from the start, not just throwing stuff together for the heck of it. The social innovations like tagging, and blogging integration were essentialy marketing efforts built on top of their platform meant to drive more people to sign up for the pro photo storage service or click on ads, not core parts of the product itself. It wasn鈥檛 social software for the sake of social software, it was 鈥渉ow can we make this product attractive to users and developers in order to drive revenue?鈥? In other words, it was a real business.
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