Flickr To Abandon Early Adopters

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Steve O'Hear opens old wounds for Flickr veterans. 'An email dropped into my in-box yesterday from Yahoo. Titled "Flickr: Update for Old Skool members", the message went on to explain that Yahoo was discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign-in system and that from March the 15th, all users will be required to have a Yahoo ID to sign-in to Flickr. It was one of those déjà vu moments when I thought, hang on a minute, haven't we been here before?. And of course we have.' Yahoo tried to pull this stunt almost two years ago, after it first acquired Flickr. So why open up old wounds? Yahoo say it is to make the service easier to manage as they add new features, such as localization. Many users are calling this BS, saying it's all about Yahoo marketing its other properties to Flickr's user-base. Much of the criticism is being lead by a prominent user named Thomas Hawk who also happens to be CEO of Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr."

Comments

So?

[DogDude]

I wouldn't call this "abandoning" anybody. They're asking users to use a (free) Yahoo login. It's not what I'd call a big deal. Yahoo did this when they acquired Launch (launch.com). Why would this bother anybody other than the tinfoil-hat types? What am I missing?

Re:So?

[NewWorldDan]

Seems pretty obvious to me. Yahoo has a standard way of doing things. Maintaining an old non-standard alternate way of doing things is a bitch. It can clash with current security protocols. While I'm sure that Yahoo wants to market their other services, I suspect there are more pragmatic reasons for making this change.

Re:So?

[crlove]

Thank you for saying what I was thinking. I was a very early adopter of Flickr, just converted to a Yahoo sign-in (which they've been suggesting you do anyway)when I received the email, and... that's it! I sign in with a different account name. No big deal.

Pretty inflammatory title for a Slashdot article. I got confused when looking at my RSS feeds and thought I was seeing Digg's.

Re:So?

[winkydink]

I guess when you've paid for the service (some of us Pro users) and have put in several years of effort uploading thousands of photographs (a lot of the pro users in Flickr are professional photographers), you are a little worried about your photos disappearing overnight.

Wait a minute... are you telling me that there are professional photographers who store their content on Flickr and don't have backup copies? Excuse me, but that doesn't sound very professional. That sounds stupid.

Re:So?

[winkydink]

OK, you invested all this time in creating metadata and didn't back it up. And you're earning a living off it to some degree. Sorry, again, it's not very bright to not have a backup of the data that is critical to your continued success.

Question

[LMacG]

How does "require a different sign on method" equate to "abandon"?

Conflict of Interest

[slughead]

Much of the criticism is being lead by a prominent user named Thomas Hawk who also happens to be CEO of Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr.

I'm sorry, was this supposed to reinforce the "OMG YAHOO IS EVIL" slant of this /. post?

So a guy who's competing with Yahoo says Yahoo sucks? ... ? ... Anyone else see a possible problem in his motivation for saying something like this?

An anonymous READER?

[drinkypoo]

Hey, we already have a term for these people, let's call a spade a spade, and a coward a coward.

With that said; if you paid for this service, vote with your dollars, and go pay someone else. If you're using a free account, stop bitching. They're giving it to you for free! If they want you to identify yourself by your high school nickname, you should be grateful... even if they did call you "logger".

Re:It's a drag.

[JFitzsimmons]

I don't get it. What's stopping you from making a yahoo account and only using flickr?

Webring all over again

[oasisweb]

The change may be small, but it is significant. This brings back bad memories of yahoo's takeover of webring.org nearly a decade ago. Their first step was also to integrate yahoo IDs. I don't know if anyone here remembers or even used webring, but back then it was a cool concept. I had a ring there with several thousand members, and I could not secure a single new member after the takeover. Soon they began to push for a "migration" to yahoo accounts and servers, but it was riddled with problems, and I ended up losing control of the ring. They eventually backed out of webring, but it was never the same again. That was actually when I started hating yahoo. They just came along, took a beautiful idea, and totally ruined it. It was brutal.

The flickr takeover has actually been far smoother than I had expected, and I'm surprised that they didn't try to yahooify flickr (too much, at least). Still, I hope this change isn't a sign of further changes or "integrations". If I wanted my photo album "integrated" with yahoo services, I would use yahoo photos. Flickr is successful because of what it is right now. Just let it be, and don't try to change that. Yahoo's "better" isn't necessarily our "better". It's always a pity when corporate interests intervene and destroy great ideas.