According to some market research I read recently, the world market for digital cameras is predicted to reach 122 million units by 2010.
That seems like an underestimate to me. Everyone I know has at least one camera, and most cellphones seem to have one. Some Nokia phones now come with 5 megapixel cameras and Zeiss lenses, enabling their users to produce images of quite startling quality.
So, every day, billions of digital photographs are taken. Until four years ago, a predictable response would have been a shrug. Very few digital pictures were printed; most were uploaded to a PC, where they mouldered on a hard drive and were rarely viewed thereafter.
But in late February 2004, a small Vancouver-based start-up changed all that. It launched Flickr.com, an image-hosting service that enabled users to upload their pictures, have them automatically resized and given a unique URL, and displayed on the web for all to see. So suddenly instead of crashing your friends' inboxes and choking their bandwidth by sending them images as email attachments, you could send them a link and they could see for themselves.
It was a brilliant idea - a killer web application whose usefulness was immediately apparent. Flickr grew exponentially. On 26 February 2004, it held 7,445 photos. By the end of March 2005, the number was up to 7.9 million. By June 2006, it was 177 million. And it's gone on like that ever since.
Flickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.
Flickr's designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking - namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr's databases. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr 'photostreams'. The results are clear for all to see. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day.
Early on in its development, Flickr introduced a feature enabling users to attach 'tags' to their photographs. I've just searched for photos tagged with 'Ireland' and come up with 1,052,368 images. (Eighteen months ago, a similar search found only 85,000.)
Most of them, as you would expect, are just ordinary snapshots - records of holidays, weddings, stag nights, parties; shots of sunsets, rainbows, ruminating cattle, green fields, ruined castles and cliffs; the odd photograph of granny with a telegraph pole apparently growing out of her head, or group pictures in which everyone's legs have been cut off at the calf. But even in the few hundred images that I scanned there were some truly extraordinary images - striking photographs that, until Flickr, would probably have languished in a shoebox but are now published for the world to see.
This is user-generated content in all its multi-faceted glory. It demonstrates in the most vivid way that there is much more talent out there in the population than was ever believed by the moguls who controlled the old print and broadcasting businesses. It's an example of what the writer Clay Shirky called the 'mass amateurisation of publishing'. And of course it is also taking its toll on business models that depended on the 'professionalisation' of photography. There's already a lot of evidence that publishers and advertisers are trawling the Flickr database for striking imagery - and occasionally exploiting it illicitly for commercial purposes.
So let us raise a glass and toast Flickr's fourth birthday. And marvel that Yahoo was able to acquire it in March 2005 for a mere $35m - which was not only the bargain of the century, but may also be part of the reason Microsoft is so desperate to acquire Yahoo.