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.
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.