Yahoo Finance LinkedIn tells Caterina Fake to apply at Flickr
Popular photo sharing site Flickr helped to usher in the age of social networking by allowing users to upload original work, comment and communicate with one another. Fake has received many awards for her entrepreneurial spirit and was named one of the "Time 100" by Time Magazine in 2006.
For all those who believe LinkedIn to soulless and empty, a social site without the social, nor much of a site, know that it’s not without a bit of whimsy. That, or the site has suddenly found a sense of snark.
The snark arrived on Monday when tech entrepreneur and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake tweeted out that LinkedIn’s algorithm took measure of her achievements and suggested she might apply for a senior product manager role on Flickr. It seems there is an opening available on the photo-sharing site’s mobile team.
At this point I should mention that Flickr is owned by Yahoo! The company bought it in 2005 for a reported US$35-million. At the time, Flickr was a year-old spin-off of sorts from Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based start-up. Within months of its meteoric launch, it had become one of the world’s most popular photo-sharing sites, landing it on Yahoo’s radar.
The irony, of course, is that had LinkedIn’s vaunted algorithm computed the data on Fake’s account a little more deeply it may have realized that she not only co-founded Ludicorp, before creating Flickr, she then moved with the company to Yahoo’s headquarter’s in Sunnyvale, before leaving in 2008 to pursue another project.
Within a year, Fake and fellow entrepreneur Chris Dixon launched Hunch, an affinity site that sought to map the tastes and interests of Internet users. Hunch was soon flipped to eBay for a reported US$80-million.
Fake is now on her third-startup, Findery, a San Francisco-based app that allows users to post annotations of a place, which people visiting the spot can then access. The service is expected to go live this summer.
Save for the sales figures involved, all of the information above is very publicly available on Fake’s LinkedIn profile. It’s certainly accessible to LinkedIn’s algorithms, needless to say. If they can’t discern that a serial entrepreneur who’s had her last two cool ideas snapped up by multi-billion tech businesses might not be terribly enchanted by the chance to apply for a mid-management position in one of those companies, what does it say about the recommendations it’s giving you?
