NEWS: Yahoo! is a Flickr Fucker

GEEK: Yahoo! is a Flickr Fucker

Flickr.com, named "Breakout of the Year" at the 2005 Webby Awards, is a popular photosharing website where users can "tag" their images with keywords so they are easily searchable. Yahoo! bought Flickr's parent company in March, and is starting to make some changes that aren't going over too well with the Flickr community. For instance, Yahoo! is about to change Flickr's format so that every Flickr account must be attached to a valid Yahoo! account, and some Flickr users are threatening account suicide over the move.

The Flickr community is rather close-knit, and is not looking forward to being integrated with the wide world of Yahoo!.

There is also the matter of potentially having your Flickr photos deleted. Any Flickr account not attached to a Yahoo! account will be deleted. If a Flickr user stops using his or her Yahoo! account and the Yahoo! account is deactivated, the Flickr account and all the images stored in it will disappear as well.

Having been a part of several online communities as they experienced growing pains (including Suicidegirls.com), I can relate to the the weighing-in from professor Sherry Turkle, director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self and author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet:

Brutal. I'm not even a Flickr user but I can definitely feel their pain. I'm crossing my fingers that Yahoo! figures out what's up.

Yeah, except Geocities has always been lame.

Ha ha, take that Geocities!

That is shitty news. I'm not a Flickr member, but I can definitely relate.

I'm a Flickr member. I actually have a Yahoo account. But I still wonder what else Yahoo has up its sleeve? I mean, it's lind of like the difference between a really cool local CD shop and Wal-Mart, know what I mean?

Attention Missy: PUH-LEASE, never, ever sell out SG to some digital media conglomerate.You just know they're going to crappify one of the few worthwhile sex/community sites on the web!

This will be interesting to see if the whole userbase picks up and leaves, thus making the actual value of the service that they paid for a lot less.

As for me, im more of a smugmug man myself

We will not stand for this minor inconvenience, schweinehunde!

For all the users that leave, I'm sure that even more will find out about Flickr because of its integration into Yahoo. That said, Yahoo's idea of integration is frankly terrible, and seems to do little more than give you a single username across a variety of services. Interfaces for acquired services are usually brought down to the same level of incoherence, and their idea of targeted advertising is laughable. It doesn't seem like they've made any real effort to tie their disparate backends together, either- they're still using eGroups headers in mail sent through their Groups service, and they bought and integrated eGroups something like six years ago, and they weren't able to offer spam filtering for the Groups stuff until a couple of years after they did so for Mail.

...and this my friends..like reality will lead to internet sprawl. I don't really see the drama in this, just a repeat and same mistakes as always.

Great title to this one by the way, good title.

on the one hand, yahoo is going to completely bone this up.

on the other hand, a few more vancouver geeks got rich off it. woo!

Whoah, Infoseek. There's a blast from the past! I'm a Flickr member and this worries me. But I mean, it's not that bad yet. I'm more worried about Rupert Murdoch buying Myspace...

WBS was great!

The thing didn't really fall apart until Disney bought Infoseek, though.

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 12:09AM]

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 12:09AM]

Found Müller's post.

This could be a bad thing, but it might not: I think Flickr is awesome, mainly because of the public aspect of the site -- it's the tags and most interesting features that make it what it is.

But your average Yahoo user doesn't get that. They don't want to share. I've seen this first hand when I tried to introduce someone to Flickr. Their reaction was "I don't want everyone to see my photos!" Even though there are privacy settings. A lot of people just don't get it.

More hilariously, there are some people in my family who are into that genealogy stuff, you know, where you dig up records of deceased relatives. And a lot of those people don't want to share their data. How in the hell do they expect to accomplish anything in that field without sharing...

Anyway, my point is that maybe the onrush of Yahoozoids will have a similar reaction.

Then again, maybe it will ruin Flickr, I dunno.

i say some smart cookie creates a new flicker site and all current flicker users just migrate to that and then yahoo is fucked is it not and jus paid a lot of money for nothing if there is nothing on it.

When are these mega-companies going to learn that they should just leave shit alone?
And threatening to delete accounts and photos because you don't register your yahoo id?

lame.

Heh, Shalome, you totally scooped Wired. Wired News: Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off!

So no blame for Ludicorp (Flickr's parent company) for selling their company to Yahoo?

They were offering a free service, and someone offered them serious money for it.

So while they may be "sellouts"....i think anyone here would probably do the same thing.

Reminds me of what happened to mp3.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.com

[Edited on Aug 31, 2005 by AceTracer]

i was thinking the same thing. this sucks, i just joined flickr not too long ago.

Yahoo also has a history of doing this. When they bought OneList and converted it to Yahoo Groups, they were notorious for making sweeping changes with little or no warning. At one point they moved over to a new system which for many groups resulted in most if not all data loss. They like to use the philosophy of "we can do whatever we want because it's free".

I'm more than unhappy about this. Yahoo's real customers are advertisers, which means that the users of theirs services are just something to be exploited..