Congrats on 20 years flickr! I still believe :-) I have over 500, 000 photos in 2 accounts most notably flickr.com/roland

So many thoughts:

  • What if flickr never left Vancouver and had somehow squared the circle and become big here in Vancouver? Imagine the possibilities and the startup scene would be totally different. See my May 26, 2005 post: Flickr leaving do at the Alibi Room tonight

  • What if the community never left and deftly managed by George, et al miraculously prospered post Yahoo! post instagram etc etc??

  • I’m sad that the community has mostly left (the community is a long tail of micro communities with no real coordination function at any level but maybe that’s the internet today a bunch of sub-cultures i.e. Switzerland instead of Canada :-) ?!?!) but I’m happy because of the amazing connections I made there and because it hosts over 2TB of my photos and videos :-)

  • The flickr API was ahead of its time and it just works! There have been some minor tweaks but 99% of the code that I’ve written still works!

Finally, see Boris’ blog post:

QUOTE:

20 years of Flickr. And I just happened to tell the story today of the tech meetup I organized in Vancouver 20 years ago. 6 people came, including Roland Tanglao, who got us all early access to Flickr.

END QUOTE

My first post about flickr from the internet archive Feb 12, 2004

From https://web.archive.org/web/20040416223220/http://www.rolandtanglao.com/2004/02/12.html

Tonight’s Geek Dinner was a blast

Had a blast at tonight’s geek dinner. gotta do this once more before the baby but unfortunately I don’t think I’ll have time!

Avi, as I anticipated, is very cool and knowledgeable and so too (again as I expected), is Boris.

Expect great stuff from these young :-) lads!

Another attendee Mary Brennan used to work on Optera Packet Core (OPC) at Nortel! What a small world. OPC was one of the clients for the internal developer relations group that I managed at Nortel!

Walter was Walter which is a good thing.

And finally Ed from Lindy Hop was there. In another case of small world, he went to the same university (UVic) as Mary and Boris and is a friend of Mary’s.

We talked about lots of cool things such as: Zerendipity, Sxip, Liberty Alliance, Passport, markets, profiles, German, C++, Python, PHP, XpertWeb, transactions, Perl, impedance mismatch, Flickr, Smalltalk, Ruby, Lisp, social software, blogs, Montreal, bagels, TalkBroadband, DSL, Shaw, iLife, GarageBand, CDs, streaming radio, the last mile broadband problem, digital identity (including Avi’s ideas about this), etc.

Just for fun, I created a YVR_GEEK_DINNER_11FEB2004 Community on Flickr exclusively for those who were there tonight (Mary, Walter, Avi, Boris, Ed and myself). Check it out!

And in a case of leaky abstractions, I managed to screw up Flickr by trying to upload multiple photos to the gallery which results in the following error message:

Warning: rename() failed (Invalid cross-device link) in /var/www/html/www.flickr.com/groups_gallery_edit.gne on line 74

Warning: getimagesize: Unable to open ‘/mnt/static1/gallery/1_IMG_4612.JPG.jpg’ for reading. in /var/www/html/www.flickr.com/groups_gallery_edit.gne on line 83

Previously

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