Fotki

Fotki is a digital photo sharing, video sharing and media social network website and web service suite. In many ways, the site appears to have much in common with different popular photo sites, which share a number of so-called Web 2.0 features such as usage of Ajax, tagging, support for RSS feeds, social bookmarking, GPS location information and Exif info display, whose most cited example is Flickr.

The service offers unlimited storage space for digital images to Premium (i.e., paid) account holders and also to free account holders from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. It also offers blogging (similar to LiveJournal or Blogger), online ordering of prints and selling of prints at custom prices, as-well as email and co-branding.

Fotki community tools allow tagging photos and videos, detailed profiling, saving and organizing links (similar to del.icio.us), as well as photo and member search using folksonomic tools.

As of July 2006, Fotki claims to have over 880 thousand registered members from 241 countries and houses over 100 million unique digital pictures. It ranks in the 900s in popularity by Alexa (compared to the 90s—lower rankings indicate more popular web sites—for Flickr owned by Yahoo and offering similar functionality).

Fotki has accounts of two types: Free and Premium. Free accounts come with basic Fotki features and have a 50 MB storage space limit and additional 10 MB every month. Premium accounts come with unlimited storage space and advanced features and tools. Not only Premiums accounts have no ads, but also logged-in Premium members can view free members' pages with no ads. Fotki Premium membership regular annual fee is US $50. Seasonal discounts and special offers are available. A new Fotki member automatically gets a two-week free Trial Premium membership.

History
Fotki was founded by Dmitri Don, Fotki current President and CEO, and Katrin Lilleoks as a privately held company in 1998. The site was created for sharing digital photos with friends and relatives living in different countries, who could browse photos and comment on them as well as upload their own. In 2001, the commercial version was launched. Since 2003, Fotki is a registered trade mark in the USA. Since March 2004, Fotki Inc. OÜ registered in Estonia represents Fotki Inc. in EU.

Etymology
In Slavic languages, like Russian and Polish, 'fotki' (pronounced with an unstressed ) is short for '‘photos’'. It is easy to follow a word-chain: ‘photography’ – ‘photos’ – ‘fotos’ – ‘fotki’. English speakers sometime interpret the word as 'photokit'.

Community
Fotki serves a few basic functions: storing and sharing images, printing and selling photos and being a platform for media social network - a social network organized around media-sharing connections.

* Fotki users have tools to hierarchically organize photos in albums and folders, tag photos and videos, as well as to geotag albums and individual photos in close integration with Google Maps using a feature called FotkiMap. Album holder can invite his friends to view an album directly from this album: to email an invitation to visit it or to invite via an instant messenger to view the slideshow together.

* Fotki community tools allow adding members as friends and sharing albums with them. Viewable profiles ("About Me" page) and member search make it possible to find members of interest; guest book with public and private messaging serves for communicating.

* Fotki has most-viewed and-most-active sections to feature its members. Since 2003, ca. 20 photo contests are held annually.

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