Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.
About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them.
Flickr was designed partly to market itself. There are a lot features, in place early on, that let people take their photo, upload it to Flickr and post them elsewhere, on their own Web site or their blog, which meant a lot of incoming links.
Imgur is all about images, some of which may be photos but don't have to be.
We want people on the Internet to go to Imgur for their viral image fix. And what's so awesome about images vs. videos is that instant gratification.
What's been important with Flickr is the community that's been there from the beginning and the serious photographers that are there creating and sharing great content. If we lose that at some point then I think we have potential issues, but so far we've been able to do a really good job of maintaining that.
We want to be like a YouTube for viral images.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
