"Indeed, the Flickr purchase helped ignite a larger strategy. Thanks to a new generation of managers like Butterfield and Fake, Yahoo is starting to see how user-generated content, or "social media," is a key weapon in its war against Google."
"This is an especially attractive idea to Yahoo veterans, since it harks back to the vision Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo had in their Stanford University dorm rooms: Categorize the Web and recommend the best sites for its users, using human editors. That vision had to be abandoned when the Web got too large. But this time the users and the editors will be one and the same, there will be enough to tackle the entire Internet--and Yahoo won't have to pay them."
-- http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/12/01/8364623/index.htm
BTW, in case you do not know, Flickr was written in PHP. They have also built a messaging component in Java, but almost everything is in PHP, atleast up to the time that it was bought by Yahoo. This is according the lead developer that did a presentation at a PHP conference just before the purchase.
"This is an especially attractive idea to Yahoo veterans, since it harks back to the vision Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo had in their Stanford University dorm rooms: Categorize the Web and recommend the best sites for its users, using human editors. That vision had to be abandoned when the Web got too large. But this time the users and the editors will be one and the same, there will be enough to tackle the entire Internet--and Yahoo won't have to pay them."
-- http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/12/01/8364623/index.htm
BTW, in case you do not know, Flickr was written in PHP. They have also built a messaging component in Java, but almost everything is in PHP, atleast up to the time that it was bought by Yahoo. This is according the lead developer that did a presentation at a PHP conference just before the purchase.
