Flickr everywhere!

Posted June 12th, 2007 at 11:27 am by Stewart Butterfield, Flickr

 6 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Flickr just graduated from langwij skool and is now available in seven new languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Portuguese.

This is the first time Flickr will be available in anything other than English and we really couldn’t be happier to see this day (really … if the team had to spend any more time working on it, I think we would have had a mutiny).

Even though a little more than half the visitors to Flickr each month already come from outside of the U.S. and the community is as global as any on the Net, this is a big move for us and will allow Flickr to blossom in more than a dozen new countries.

It will still be one global site and one global community (not separate sites), but one that will make it a lot easier for people to share with and connect to those that matter to them. That means more shared perspectives, a lot more happy members, and a Flickr that’s better for everyone.

To celebrate, we’re hosting a series of global community events starting this month in Berlin, Paris, London and Montreal. We’re also excited to unveil the “24 Hours of Flickr” book, a global photo project that illustrates the day in the life of the Flickr community. Users were encouraged to submit one photo taken on May 5, 2007, and the pictures tell an amazing story.

The book will be sold at cost and we’ll be be donating $1 for each book sold to benefit Médecins Sans Frontières (up to a total of $10,000 USD). If you’re interested, details will be posted on the 24 Hours of Flickr group page as soon as the book is available. Otherwise, you can check out our slideshow, which features some of the wonderful photos from the book.

We want to thank all of our nearly 9 million members for making Flickr so great. Keep those interesting photos coming!

Stewart Butterfield
Co-Founder & General Manager of Flickr

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6 Comments Add your own

G. Chai | June 12th, 2007 at 11:46 am

Flickr is one of the few Yahoo! websites that I use regularly. Congrats to all the folks at Flickr for the fantastic job they do.

doug | June 13th, 2007 at 12:46 am

But blocked in China.

Justin Thorp | June 13th, 2007 at 6:23 am

Kudos on the move to localizing the site. Hopefully more Web 2.0 sites will take the cue from you guys and now better understand the opportunities that are unlocked from better serving our global audiences.

Moritz | June 14th, 2007 at 1:16 am

Stewart, Flickr is censored in Germany! What are the reasons for this? You know that you will lose a lot of loyal users if this will not change. I would really appreciate some words of justification or just a reason for doing this.

http://moritzpetersen.de/index.php/archives/2007/06/14/against-censorship/

Gerald Buckley | June 18th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

Wow. Four days and no response to Moritz. Not like you Mr. B. Lay it out there plain and simple. (I still won’t rejoin Flickr or MyYahoo! though, sorry, damage is done)

Rex Soliveres | June 25th, 2007 at 9:57 am

Flickr is cool! It has been a good venue for people to share their photos to their friends, relatives and even to the whole wide world. Using your Yahoo! ID in Flickr is even more convenient.