Geotagging A Huge Success for Flickr
Flickr introduced geotagging as an experimental new feature on Monday. The photo sharing site had hoped that they would see the Flickr community geotag one million photos within the first month. Surprisingly, they hit 1.2 million geotagged photos in the first 24 hours.
As Stewart Butterfield notes on the Flickr Blog, some days see over a million new photos uploaded to Flickr. So, as geotagging catches on, the site will become an astoundingly huge collection of place-specific image data. This is a positive advancement for players in location-based search — this type of evangelism is precisely what they need.
Stewart also announced the enhancement of Flickr's API to add some more geotag functionality. Site developers can now mash Flickr photos onto any other map service that they want to use. The API update also includes permissions management for geodata and new parameters for accuracy when dropping that pin on the map.
Yahoo isn't interested in sending developers away that quickly, so they've offered some incentive to stick around. Stewart promises "coming soon" improvements to Yahoo's maps, including more street level images in Yahoo Local.
