Please wait...Today Is Fotki's Birthday: 8 Years Online!
Yes, we have our birthday today! The day we want to tell you what we were, what we are, and what we want to be.
How it was, year after year?
The first version of Fotki was released on September 27, 1998: A personal website was founded by Fotki current President, Dmitri Don, together with Katrin Lilleoks. Fotki's first headquarters was in its founders' New York City apartment. Fotki was a hobby for them and for a close circle of their friends and relatives living in different countries: It was the beginning of media social network.
1999: Friends of friends and friends of those friends asked for permission to use the site for photo storage and communication; and Fotki community was literally snowballing. A user-friendly system was appreciated by users; and Fotki had sweepingly grown beyond a personal website into a web service. First 1,000 members created the Fotki'99 community.
2000: The more features, the more happy Fotki users - 5,000 members already. At the same time, the variety of convenient upload tools popped up the stored photos amount.
2001: After Fotki community grew up to 10,000 members, Premium membership and online photo printing were introduced.
2002: We have 25,000 members and 5,000,000 photos hosted - to handle the growing service, we needed more full-time employees; to be closer to our users, we introduced phone customer service.
2003: 100,000 members and 15,000,000 photos. To keep them safe and sound, we moved our servers to a new world-class data center with 24/7 monitoring. More full-time employees joined Fotki team. Premium members got the ability to keep online journals and an option to sell photo prints. New uploading tools and slideshow made photo sharing more pleasant. Fotki runs first photo contest.
2004: 400,000 members, 30,000,000 photos hosted. Fotki expands the Old World exploring: European office was opened. Fotki Blog started to communicate with users promptly and in a less formal manner.
2005: Fotki is entering Web 2.0 world. Our 650,000 members have 50,000,000 photos online, enjoy convenient social bookmarking, RSS feeds, photo tagging, upload by email, and geotagging. We opened a new office in New York City, near Times Square.
2006: 1,000,000 members from more than 200 countries, over 100,000,000 photos. We continue to be a fast-growing media social network with interface in 12 languages, profiles and members search. And - what is most pleasant - we are a tremendous international family, whose members love their digital photos home.
Today's Fotki is the spirit of the Internet's very idea: the Web connecting people all over the world!
Dear Fotki members, thank you for your continued excitement and support! Thank you for your kind and critical words! If not for you, we would have never become what we are now!
Many thanks and warmest cheers from all of us at Fotki.
Join to us in celebration of Fotki.com 8th birthday, a significant milestone of Fotki growth and development.
Yours,
Fotki Team