David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you think about the web to this point, it had been mostly unidirectional content. They were flat websites, you would go, you could potentially see some pros, there were images that were uploaded, we had the advent of ecommerce with Amazon having successfully navigated through the dot-com bubble. You’ve got the first place where you actually start to buy things but they’re still not the notion that we have today that websites are interactive, that I can upload things, download things, interact with other people. That’s not on the actual site itself. You needed to download something like Napster in order to do that. The presses are blown away there and some mainstream press, but even more importantly, all these other bloggers that are there. The blogosphere ends up being the perfect early adopters for Flickr because all of these people have blogs, most of them run on Blogger. At this point, Google had already bought Blogger, Evan Williams’ company, but Blogger didn’t have native photos in it. What does Google and Blogger do? They see this and they’re like, “Great, use Flickr for photos if you want to host photos on your blog.” It just starts to spiral. This is like the Google of yesteryear where rather than saying, “We’re going to clone that and do our product. It’s so cool, that’s great. We don’t have to build it, we’ll just put button to make your thing work. Sure, you can have some users.”…

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