Not sure why people are defending flickr. There are lots of equivilent websites, and have been long before it ever existed. I stand by my comment: It's fundamentally lame. If I was a CS professor, I would have sophmores make a clone of it for a 2-week project. Just because it's the most popular in its class doesn't mean it transcends the extreme simplicity of said class.
Frankly, I don't even like it. Whose aesthetic ideal is responsible for the decision to show pictures at a size other than the maximum (up to a practical limit)? Show me the full-sized picture. Just seems obvious.
Missing the point. Sites that have been technologically equivalent or better than Flickr have been around since the first dot-com boom. The genius of Flickr was in building a community around it.
It's really easy for technophiles to say "Oh, I could build that in a week", and usually they can. The problem is, nobody will use it. Building a community is really fricking hard - it's the sort of task where everyone says "Oh, I can do that" up until they actually try it and then find out that there's a lot of subtlety to it they've completely missed.
Same goes for Reddit, and Twitter. Those are two other sites that are cloneable in a weekend, but nobody will use your clone.
Flickr occupies a weird space between photo.net (which is almost all photographers) and Facebook (people who take photos of each other). It may be great for photo-hosting, but no-one wants that in a vaccuum.
What does cloning some website have to do with computer science?
Two upmods. Hmm. At least two other people think your question a good one. Okay. (EDIT: Three now)
Well, websites are closely associated with many of the topics in computer science. There are, for instance, programming languages, algorithms, data structures, etc, involved in producing a website, no matter the actual content of the website. Likewise, many computer science professors have classes with names like "Software Engineering" which have large-scale projects similar to real-life projects.
Frankly, I don't even like it. Whose aesthetic ideal is responsible for the decision to show pictures at a size other than the maximum (up to a practical limit)? Show me the full-sized picture. Just seems obvious.
What exactly does this have:
http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/in/photostream/
That this doesn't:
http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/sizes/o/in/photost...
(Obviously, you could put the various widgets next to and below the above picture with plenty of space to spare.)