Flickr is graduating from language school — Says salut, hola, ciao, hallo and three more…
San Francisco — Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo Inc., said on Tuesday it is moving to further internationalize its service by creating versions in seven major languages besides English to help the global Flickr community more easily explore, find, manage and share photos.
Until now, the Yahoo photo-sharing site had operated in English only. But on Tuesday, Yahoo is extending its interface to speakers of Spanish, French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese. A Japanese site remains in the works with independently operated Yahoo Japan Corp.
The three-year-old service, which was founded in Vancouver, Canada by the husband-and-wife team of Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, already sees more than half of its users coming from outside the United States, and this new language support will bring the Flickr community to even more people around the world and let them discover over 525 million photos taken by Flickr members from all over the world.
These are the markets where Flickr is taking off already, Butterfield said in an interview.
He rather splendidly added: Why are we only getting around to this now? There are two answers. One: we are stupid. Two: that we are late.
As of April, Flickr had 24 million active monthly users, according to online audience measurement firm comScore Inc. Fifty-five percent come from overseas and the rest are located in the United States, according to internal company figures.
The company expects membership growth from the move, said Butterfield, though he was not specific about the company’s goals.
Flickr was first to popularize the notion of Web site “tagging,” the simple trick of applying short words or phrases to help other Web users find material of interest. The sites users have added around 12.5 million unique tags, including generic words and geographic and other names, according to Butterfield.
Of course, there are still significant language barriers with the text on Flickr that users supply–photo titles, captions, comments and tags.
Though no magic universal translator has been invented, Yahoo has been pondering that issue, as well, Butterfield said. Yahoo has considered adding computer-based translation, but that area shows little promise, he said. Despite research into the area that dates back to the 1950s, it still blows, he added.
But for now, there are some translation workarounds. For example, some groups of Flickr photographers explicitly try to accommodate their international membership by using multilingual text. And Flickr’s tag cluster analysis tools, which monitor which tags are commonly used in conjunction with other tags, can bridge gaps.
For example, a Japanese user who types in the Japanese characters for “Tokyo” can click to see clusters of related tags, the top one of which is the English term “Tokyo.”
Regarding which countries have contributed most to the 525 million images already available on Flickr, Butterfield said the UK and Canada trail the US, with Germany, Brazil, Spain, France, and then Australia next up "in terms of users."
To celebrate this milestone, Flickr will host a series of global community events starting this month in Berlin, Paris, London and Montreal.
Flickr will also unveil its 24 Hours of Flickr commemorative book illustrating life as it happened around the world in one day.
24 Hours of Flickr was a global photo project for which members were encouraged to submit one photo taken on May 5, 2007 to illustrate that day in the life of the Flickr community.