Gallery: Giz Hearts Maker's Faire
That's Lisa and yours truly at the Flickr/Yahoo! booth, where they'd take a polaroid and scan it using some custom ware on a Sharp photocopier directly to Flickr. — And here's my photo stream of 90 photos from the amazing and completely overwhelming Maker's Faire.
Context & Ripple Effects
This gallery lands mid-way through Flickr's busiest year yet under Yahoo: Collections shipped in March after long-standing user requests, a Chinese-language version targeting Hong Kong followed days later, and unconfirmed April rumors circulated that Flickr's owners had turned down acquisition money from AOL. Against that backdrop, a Flickr/Yahoo booth at Maker Faire reads as the same accessibility-and-brand push carried into the physical world — a continuation of the outreach that began when Flickr was still telling photographers their photos were not yet on Flickr back in October 2005.
The detail that elevates the piece above a photo dump is the booth's rig: custom software driving a Sharp photocopier to scan polaroids straight into Flickr accounts. It is an analog-to-cloud pipeline demonstrated live, built from office hardware rather than a dedicated scanner product.
First-order effects
- Gizmodo's 90-photo stream puts Maker Faire in front of its gadget-focused readership immediately, while the Flickr/Yahoo booth converts walk-up attendees' analog snapshots into hosted uploads on the spot — marketing and new content in one gesture.
Second-order effects
- Sharp gets an unplanned consumer showcase for its imaging hardware at a hobbyist fair, a different audience than the MP3-player line it promoted in late 2006; any rival photo service wanting the maker crowd now has to answer with physical presence rather than feature lists alone.
Third-order effects
- If photo platforms keep meeting users at fairs and workshops instead of waiting for uploads, growth shifts from feature releases toward embedded capture points — a structural turn for services whose 2007 momentum so far came from software updates like Collections and localization.
The trend: Photo-sharing platforms are extending their reach beyond the browser in 2007, wiring physical-world capture directly into their services to grow alongside — and beyond — feature launches.