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?

[Sloppy]

What am I missing?

The fact that the old Fickr knew how to spell "school" and Yahoo does not.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think old Flicker was that good a speller either.

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?

[sean_ex_machina]

You are missing the chance to stir up trouble in the hope of luring people over to your Flickr knockoff site, that's what you're missing.

Re:So?

[metlin]

Actually, it is a little more complex than that.

The problem is that Yahoo! has a nasty habit of deleting accounts for a number of reasons, and there have been several instances of this happening.

I've had my Yahoo! account disappearing, my mails disappearing etc. 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.

I wrote a detailed rant about it, The Flickr Fiasco - Why Yahoo! Should Learn to Listen to Its Customers.

I guess it boils down to the fact that as paying customers, we thought our opinions would have a say in the matter. But it turns out that it does not, and they are going to go ahead and do something that almost the entire Old Skool userbase of Flickr is against. I do not know, I guess maybe I am being naive in some ways.

*shrug*

Re:So?

[Rob T Firefly]

I was an early adopter of Flickr, and really liked it. The concept, the interface, the community, it was all great for my purposes. However, I really don't like today's Yahoo, either as a service provider, or as a company. This is for a multitude of reasons, most of which have been repeated ad nauseum here on /. and elsewhere.

When Yahoo bought Flickr I didn't immediately jump ship. I did like the service, and it didn't seem that Yahoo had messed with things all that much. They seemed to be staying in the background of their acquisition for once and let it continue being what it was good for, rather than immediately poking around and screwing things up beyond recognition and destroying whatever it was that made the "little guys" it purchases successful in the first place (cf. Webring, Egroups, Geocities, etc.) This move, however, was the last straw which dissolved my final bit of loyalty to Flickr. Zap goes my account, and the two months of paid time I had left on it.

Flickr was fun while it lasted, but on the bright side that was the motivation I needed to quit being such a lazy bastard and shove a Gallery script into the next overhaul of my website, and upload the better stuff to Wikimedia Commons while I'm at it.

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?

[cmacb]

"Why would this bother anybody other than the tinfoil-hat types? What am I missing?"

The problem is that this looks a lot like (because it probably is) a bait-and-switch tactic.

When you get a Yahoo ID you also get a Yahoo e-mail address which you may not need or want. By default you also agree to be marketed to from a list of about 15 categories, and they ask some personal questions that many people would rather not answer. I have a Yahoo ID which I sign onto about once a month to delete the THOUSANDS of spam messages that have accumulated there (about half the spam goes to the spam folder, but almost as much stays in the inbox because yahoo sucks at identifying even the most obvious cases). My Yahoo e-mail ID is totally useless for mail, as I'd never find a legitimate message in all the junk that shows up there (often with dates in the future so that any legitimate message would be way down the list).

Most of the service providers are moving in the opposite direction. When Google acquired Blogger, the companies that created Docs and Spreadsheets, (and some others I think) they had to merge in overlapping name spaces which is a pain. But in every case that I've been involved, they ultimately allow either Google ID, or foreign ID, in the form of an external e-mail address to be used to sign in. The benefit is that external e-mail addresses are guaranteed to be unique. I'd much rather be known as me@mydomain.com rather than have to come up with some odd combination of letters and numbers that nobody else has thought of.

Yahoo went along with this trend too for a while, but my guess is that sagging ad sales has caused someone at the top to reverse course so that they can con advertisers with inflated user counts etc.

Re:So?

[metlin]

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.

You don't get it, do you? It's not just about backup - it is about everything else. The organization, the tags, the categorized way of storing your pictures.

It is not merely the photos, but rather the meta-data. People who like photography put in a lot of work on their photos, and have them categorized and tagged in detail. Not to mention user comments and the like.

They are worried about losing that.

Consider this - you have taken a photograph 5 years ago, and you wrote all about it. Do you think you'd be able to remember anything in detail about it today? Now imagine this for 5,000 photographs. Do you think you'd be able to remember everything about every photograph that you'd categorized and organized?

That is what people are afraid of losing.

Do you think it would be easy to go back and redo all that? I would imagine not.

Re:So?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Stupid is when you make assumptions about what someone actually said instead of, you know, reading their comment.

Even if you do have the pictures backed up, it takes a substantial amount of time to upload them to yahoo, tag them, title them, etc etc. Having all your hard work uploading and categorizing go to hell because Yahoo is pathetic is, well... really pathetic.

Of course, Yahoo is a known reprobate. Sure, they provide useful services to the web for free - for example I'm on a freecycle mailing list, and they host it. But they're also a spyware-bundler (ever installed yahoo messenger?) and they do various other annoying things. So the responsible thing to do would have been to leave flickr when it was purchased by yahoo. This would of course have incurred the same overhead in time as losing your yahoo account... but you'd know that it wouldn't just happen to you unexpectedly. And you wouldn't be supporting yahoo, which let's face it, really is less than responsive to the desires of even paying users which is what this is all about.

Bottom line though is that if you don't like how you're treated, barring some kind of contract, your sole remedy is to take your money elsewhere. Sure, sometimes you can petition or whatever and convince them that they're going to lose a lot of money if you do that. But then maybe they're actually losing money on flickr subscribers, and their goal is to get rid of them...

Re:So?

[Hijacked Public]

that doesn't sound very professional. That sounds stupid

Those two terms aren't mutually exclusive.

I'm a professional photographer who knows better than to a) use Flickr at all, and b) store my photos on disks I don't control. Photography is no different from other professions, we have plenty of hacks who are able to earn a living despite knowing little more than where the shutter release is located.

With the increasing number of cheap digital SLR bodies and even cheaper lenses to clamp on them I suspect this will only get worse in the coming years.

Re:So?

[cetialphav]

Same here. I have been a Flickr user for a very long time. Switching is not a big deal, so I don't understand this hatred at all. It isn't like Flickr is kicking people off or deleting their photos. And Flickr has given plenty of warning that this was coming; I think they have bent over backwards to try to accommodate people. Flickr is Yahoo; they are not separate entities so it makes sense to have a common login. Do people really hate Yahoo that much?

I worked in retail for a long time and one thing I learned is that you just can't make some people happy. They will always find something to complain about. I found that it was better to let them storm out mad. You wouldn't really lose business because they get mad at your competition, too, and end up coming back.

I think the Yahoo/Flickr haters will find something to despise at every other photo hosting site.

Re:So?

[DogDude]

Hang on... you dumped your Yahoo account, and you're upset, that they... dumped your Yahooo account?

Every business gets suggestions from their customers. Many are implemented, many are not. If your suggestion is 1. Just plain dumb 2. Too expensive 3. Too difficult or 4. Something that only a tiny fraction of users care about, it won't get adopted. I'm sure that Yahoo knows about the handful of "Old Skool" (whatever that means) users, and quite honestly don't care. If you've got millions of customers, and a hundred are asking for this bizarre request, why would they care? Every business gets wacky requests from some of its customers from time to time (mine is no different). It's up to the business if it's worth the time, money, and effort to fulfill those requests. If they don't, and those customers making those wacky requests leave, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might even be a good thing, because every business has customers that are more trouble than they're worth. I gotta imagine that people moaning about going through "all of the trouble" to get a Yahoo account fall in the category of being more trouble than they're worth.

Re:So?

[AudioEfex]

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?

You aren't missing anything. I'm actually embarrassed for /. because of the obvious slant of the title. They aren't "abandoning" anyone, and it's just a bunch of disgruntled people who like to complain about the little irrelevant crap in life while ignoring the bigger issues of the world.

They aren't restricting access to anyones account, they aren't changing anyones account, they are simply making people get a login and password to conform to the company that now pays the bills at Flickr. This is nothing more than that loser with the other site (why does he care so much about Flickr if his own site is so awesome?) trying to stir up some controversy. And /. fell for it, unfortunately.

Oh no, the bad guys want you to have a Yahoo ID so their system is easier to administrate. Duck and cover. Or go pay for your own webspace elsewhere. Yahoo could have just folded Flickr into Yahoo Photos and dropped the service entirely - stop crying about having to change your login info. The world will continue to spin. Pay attention to the rest of the world and you'll see that there are much bigger fish to fry.

This brings out classic human nature : if Flickr cost $4.99 a month and these changes were made, people would have said, "Well, you get what you pay for." Give someone something for free, slightly change it, and suddenly you are the evil enemy.

Anyone who complained about this should quit flickr out of protest. It's the only right thing to do - I'm sure the world won't miss your pics too much; if you have time to sit and cry over this non-issue then I doubt they are very interesting.

AE

Re:So?

[DogDude]

I have a Yahoo ID which I sign onto about once a month to delete the THOUSANDS of spam messages that have accumulated there

Why? You get an email account that you don't like and you don't use. So.... what's the point? Don't use it. End of story.

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.

Re:So?

[lioncoeur]

You obviously dont know the meaning of pain. I severed myself from anything to do with Yahoo (miserable sods) when they ganked my Rocketmail account back in the day.

Re:So?

[CrackedButter]

When I first encountered Flickr, it was in Beta stage, fine I thought, I will get a free account and see what happens when its complete. Fast forward to present day and its in Gamma stage, I've still not paid for the service. Why did you pay for a service which was a Beta product? Anything can and could happen. Have you ever bought beta software before and expected a flawless service, why expect something different now?

Maybe its just me but I've already got a yahoo account so I didn't give a shit when Yahoo took over and I don't really care now, mainly because I haven't paid for the service. Next time sit a new product out and see what happens. I see a mole hill being turned into a mountain here.

Re:So?

[russellh]

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.

True, and that's what users hate most about IT. standards that crush everything in their path, including the people. actual users hate an IT that pragmatically serves the interests of IT, rather than the real needs of users. Not that I have any inside info here.

Re:So?

[ejp1082]

In fairness, it's a big deal for some.

People who joined Flickr early got their preferred screen name. "MyPhotography123" or something like that, and built up an identity and reputation around that. Many people were complaining that the same screen name they had on Flickr isn't available on Yahoo, which suffers from 10+ years of people registering accounts with them and a refusal to retire dead ones.

It also raises a larger issue of identity management: There are people who (for whatever reason) don't want their activities on Flickr linked to other Yahoo services (and people do use Finance, Answers, etc). It makes it harder to keep discrete identities (and discrete levels of anonymity) across the web. That's my complaint about the whole thing, although honestly it bothers me more with Google than Yahoo simply because I use more of Google's stuff. That's a bigger issue than just Flickr/Yahoo though.

And yeah, there are people who just hate Yahoo, as they don't have a stellar record when it comes to customer service, privacy, or account security.

None of this is the end of the world, but neither is it trivial.

Re:So?

[metlin]

OK, you invested all this time in creating metadata and didn't back it up.

Some do, most don't. You assume that everyone who does photography know technology. There is no particularly easy way to backup all that meta-data, and it becomes harder still if you are not a techie.

And you're earning a living off it to some degree.

Some do, some don't.

Sorry, again, it's not very bright to not have a backup of the data that is critical to your continued success.

Perhaps, I can't say I disagree with that. But like I said, the idea behind being a paying customer is that you hope these situations do not come to pass (I pay you for a service, you provide that service well).

Now, if this were a corporate account, such data loss would be met with lawsuits. Since it is individuals here, there isn't a whole lot people can do about it.

At the end of the day, people are worried about the integrity of their data. Are there alternatives and possibilities for backup? Sure, but it's not something that can happen overnight.

The only bone that people have to pick is that Flickr is moving to a company with a known trackrecord for poor data integrity, poor maintenance and lack of customer support. The reason that they gave us was a stupid one - that they wanted to give all the cool features that Yahoo! had. The point is, those that are interested in those features would have merged anyway, those of us who aren't don't particularly care.

As original users, we were the first to be with Flickr before it became a part of Yahoo!, the first community. When Yahoo! bought Flickr, it wasn't just the service, it was also this community. By doing this, Flickr is essentially telling the community that helped it all along that it does not care for them anymore.

Isn't there a lesson in business and usability about listening to your customers? Or something?

Re:So?

[cyberfunkr]

I've had my Yahoo! account disappearing, my mails disappearing etc. 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.

So you're worried about Yahoo! losing your account/photos, but you're not worried about Flickr losing your account/photos?

Flickr is a great way to get your photos out to the world, but one could only hope that you would have originals stored somewhere else. My ex- is a graphic artist/marketing specialist. Original photos and ad campaigns are saved in protective sleeves and stored elsewhere. Digital copies are on her local computer, the server she hosts them on, and copies are regularly burnt to CD/DVD. If the client somehow loses anything (or in your case, "disappearing from Yahoo/Flickr", it can be easily replaced in minutes. And if Flickr is also your only portfolio, I would recommend getting a cheap host and creating your own online portfolio. Use Flickr for displaying everything, and your personal website for showing off the best stuff.

I guess it boils down to the fact that as paying customers, we thought our opinions would have a say in the matter.

Don't confusing being a stakeholder with a shareholder. Paying customers are merely stakeholders. You have money invested but it does not give you any more say then the next guy other than you can stop giving them money and take your business elsewhere. I fully agree that any business should listen to ALL opinions. Talk to the paying customers and find out why they pay and how to get them to continue paying. Talk to the people that aren't customers and find out why they aren't willing to pay for the product.

I have no doubt that your rant was heard, but someone, somewhere had a more compelling argument. Like the IT Department (a shareholder) complaining about having to maintain two different authentication measures; Flickr login vs. Yahoo! accounts.

Re:So?

[HorsePunchKid]

You don't get it, do you? It's not just about backup - it is about everything else. The organization, the tags, the categorized way of storing your pictures. Do they offer an API for exporting all of this valuable metadata? That's one thing that made it easy for me to get into del.icio.us a few years ago: no worries about being locked into their system. Of course del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo now, too, and as far as I know the APIs are all still there and quite usable!

Re:So?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

While there is some work in uploading photos, I would hope that Flckr users aren't keeping their only copy up.

How did you not get the [site name] brackets telling which site the link goes?

Re:So?

[Yakman]

Your Flickr screen name has nothing to do with your Yahoo! account name. I signed up for Flickr when it was still the "oldskool" login. They announced that they would be turning those off in preference for Y! logins not long after (this was a few years ago), but I guess it didn't happen. Either way I already had a Y! account which I didn't use much but it was there, so I converted the login across. Didn't have to change my Flickr name or anything else. On all the computers I use the cookie remembers who I am so I can't remember the last time I actually had to login (which is occasionally annoying because I can never remember what my Y! account name is).

Either way, you could be jblow1234@yahoo.com but sign up for Flickr as "JoePhotography" if it's available.

Re:So?

[xrayspx]

"Pro" doesn't indicate that you're "Professional" in any way. A "Pro" Flickr account gives you the ability to have more than 3 albums, greater storage, and it's like $2/month. So don't think that all, or even most, Pro users make a living off of any of the stuff they put on Flickr.

Re:So?

[ejp1082]

Ah, fair enough, misunderstanding on my part. Thanks for the info.

Re:So?

[yodleboy]

hey, 5 years ago, your options for tagging/organizing your images was more sparse. now... come on. photoshop has an image gallery with this ability. you'd figure a "pro" would have photoshop. how about picasa... windows vista has some nice photo management tools now... blah blah blah. like the other poster, i would think a "pro" would have purchased one of the numerous "pro"/business/studio oriented photo management suites. hey why not build your OWN website to host your images. how cool would that be. and no yahoo!

i just can't get my head around a "pro" using only an online repository to manage photos and metadata AND not having a backup. weird. why don't they go to a photo site like photo.net? there are some amazing portfolios there from "pro" and non "pro" photographers. metadata, citiquing, rating. and no yahoo login to bunch ones panties.

i get the feeling that some people will never be happy. ohhh! flickr. but i have to use yahoo to login. i will never use flickr again because of yahoo. lol. sounds like it must not be such a hot-shit site anyway.

time to grow up kids. hey, i've had a yahoo id pretty much as long as they've been available, and i guess i should get it tattooed on me so when i meet people they will know how cool i am and how old skooool. there are some whiny people out there.

Re:So?

[syousef]

Well for security reasons (ie morons who open virus infected email) yahoo email is blocked at work. Any content that requires flickr login will now be blocked by association too now. Central signin means that if one thing is blocked everything is blocked. By the way, I don't like hats, tinfoil or otherwise.

Re:So?

[metlin]

hey, i've had a yahoo id pretty much as long as they've been available, and i guess i should get it tattooed on me so when i meet people they will know how cool i am and how old skooool. there are some whiny people out there.

I was a Rocketmail user from 1997, long before Yahoo! bought out Rocketmail and it became Yahoo! mail.

Shortly thereafter, my email account mysteriously disappeared. By the time I had gotten through, someone else had already taken my existing username - and of course, it was a very joyful experience.

A couple of years later, my inbox mysteriously was empty, and once again, complaints to Yahoo! customer support did not do a thing.

I could go on, but let's just say that from my past experience, Yahoo! acquisitions have been ugly experiences for me, and so has the "Yahoo! experience" in general.

Re:So?

[kchrist]

On all the computers I use the cookie remembers who I am so I can't remember the last time I actually had to login (which is occasionally annoying because I can never remember what my Y! account name is).

You've just illustrated the problem right there. I went from being able to log in to Flickr using my regular e-mail address, which is easy, to having to log in using something like genericuser2343253@yahoo.com, an address which I had to create specifically for this purpose and one that I'll never use outside of this. What are the chances I'm going to remember it when I want to log in from a different computer six months down the road?

This just shows how little concern Yahoo has for their users (and paying customers, in my and a lot of other cases), particularly the "old skool" early adopters that made Flickr worth buying in the first place.

Re:So?

[winkydink]

It may or may not mean professional in the context you mention, but it sure seemed to in the post I initially replied to which said "...(a lot of the pro users in Flickr are professional photographers)...", so that is the basis of my assumption and reply.

Re:So?

[6ame633k]

Actually - that begs the question - can you back up the meta data? Does anyone know how?!! As far as I can tell the best you can do is make a slideshow out of them. I am a paying FLICKR user as well and uploading all my photos and cataloging them took weeks. It seemed like the easiest thing to do at the time, as I could not be bothered with buying photo software and posting it on a website...I am sure I will regret this decision sooner than later :(

Someone should make an app that ports all that info out of Flickr :)

and yes, I would agree, my friends and family are totally thwarted by the Yahoo ID thing, I could only get a few of them to sign up.

Re:So?

[jrockway]

If this matters to you so much cancel your account and switch to a different photo-hosting provider. There are hundreds. If you don't switch, you obviously don't really care. So stop whining.

Re:So?

[Sentry21]

I was even luckier. Early adopter of flickr, I have a yahoo account as well. I 'merged' my two accounts so now I use my Yahoo! account to login to flickr. Total changes? None. My yahoo account name is the same as my flickr account, and the e-mail address on both is the same. The 'Are you sure you want to do this?' page was quite amusing, listing all my information off twice.

Total changes to my login procedures? None whatsoever.

Re:So?

[nath_de]

Why we paid? Well simply, because we use it. The free version is more of a teaser compared with the pro membership.

Re:So?

[nath_de]

Read the thread on Flickr about this topic. There are hundreds of old pro members posting there, not liking the change. And quite a few of them will leave. I never seriously looked for another photo service - now I will.

Re:So?

[permaculture]

With apologies to Public Enemy

I got a message from the Flickereenos
The other day
Opened it and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me to sign up for Yahoo! or whatever
Picture me givin a damn, I said never
Here is a Company that never gave a damn
About a brother like myself
Because I never did
I wasnt wit it, but just that very minute...
It occurred to me
The suckers had authority

Peace out.

Re:So?

[AudioEfex]

Oh please. Yahoo don't pays the bills at Flickr. The users are paying bills for both Flickr AND Yahoo !! And Yahoo wants to blackmail those people. I'm and oldschool and dont want to switch. I'm paying for my flick account, and after 15 march will be not able to log into my paid account ? Thats simply crazy.

I'll see your "Oh please," and raise you a "get over yourself".

The argument that "I will not be able to log into..." is simply a lie. Yes, you will be able to login, once you either use an existing, or create a new, Yahoo! ID. It will take you only a few seconds, and costs you nothing.

I understand the "principle" here, but also see it for what it is : people who are set in their ways and have this big chip over their shoulder about a stupid login ID. Gives you something to cry and bitch about.

Nothing about the quality of service is changing, just the stupid text string you type to login. Oooh, the horror!

Again, as I said above, if you don't like it - STOP USING IT. That's your choice. But the crying and whining over absolutely nothing other than your bad attitude about an extremely simple change just makes you look silly. It looks like a little kid who won't eat their sandwich because Mommie cut it in half through the middle instead of diagonally - inconsequential, not a big deal, and you just look like a brat for making a stink.

AE

Re:So?

[CmdrGravy]

Again, if this is so valuable then they should back it up and have control over it themselves.

Before you say that can't be done, it can. I have all my photos organised into albums and tagged and reproduce my Flickr account with the click of a button. All that would be missing is the comments and the group memberships which is not a big deal.

Both Yahoo and Flickr have said that if you've paid for an account then they will not delelte anything until your account is expired which is exactly what you'd expect. If you're not paying for it then you have no expectation that Flickr should do anything in the way of archiving things for you.

Re:So?

[lilburne]

Haven't you heard about pen and paper?

Re:So?

[kchrist]

I think if "write it down on a slip of paper and carry it around with you" is your idea of a reasonable solution then you have a great future ahead of you on Yahoo's usability team.

Re:So?

[globeadue]

Same story for LaunchCast users.. I was an original Launch user, when yahoo bought them out, without asking me took my launch account that identified me only as a username, and took my yahoo profile to it. They also locked down features of launch and I was stuck for a year with some crappy settings until they changed things around. I also saw the loss of several good features and non mainstream music drop from the playlists. SO just give it up, and move on, its the way yahoo runs with things.

Question

[LMacG]

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

Re:Question

[needacoolnickname]

When you are emo everything relates to abandon.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you have to create a new user id / account? So you could have to abandon your old flickr account?

That's almost entirely wrong. You do have to create a new Yahoo ID (if you don't have one already), but you can then merge your old Flickr account with it, so you don't lose any of your settings, photos, etc. You even keep the old e-mail address, so you are not forced to use the Yahoo Mail one.

See:
http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Re:Question

[Salvance]

Primarily because the users are worried that they'll start getting a ton of unsolicited mail, popups, etc. while logged into the Yahoo network. If you're an "old skool" user, you can at least direct all messages to spam and won't be "logged in" after leaving flickr. My personal opinion is that Yahoo is evil, and will do everything possible to collect information about me while I'm surfing. Take their toolbar, or even worse, their purchase of MyBlogLog. Users view both as spying, and most want nothing to do with it.

Re:Question

[kchrist]

Yahoo certainly seems to have abandoned ease-of-use. This is not something new, of course, but it's something we paying Flickr customers hoped would not be visited upon us.

Re:Question

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

Because if the article title read "Yahoo's Flickr To Require Yahoo! ID for Sign-In" nobody would have read the article. Do the math, follow the money, quote your favorite cliché...

S0?

[geekoid]

" Many users are calling this BS, saying it's all about Yahoo marketing its other properties to Flickr's user-base"

Which is within their rights as the owner of said company.

Jeez people, if you don't like it find another place to post pictures of your drunk cat.

Zoomr?

[BandwidthHog]

I’ve been a fan of Mike Hawk’s photography for a while now, but man, Zoomr couldn’t really be a more blatant clone of Flickr if it tried.

Re:Zoomr?

[Rob T Firefly]

I liked Flickr, but I hate Yahoo. It seems this couldn't be more perfect for me if it tried.

Re:Zoomr?

[Kadin2048]

I think that's the point.

It's Flickr, which a lot of people like, but without Yahoo, which a lot of people hate.

I wonder if it works with the FlickrExport plugins for iPhoto and Aperture...if it does, I might be interested. I narrowly missed getting onto Flickr before the Yahoo buyout, and everyone seems pretty universally convinced that it's gone downhill since then. (Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature, e.g. printing.)

It's pretty obvious that Yahoo bought Flickr for its userbase, and the whole idea is to develop Flickr users into users of Yahoo's other (ad-laden) services, and also use Flickr to bring in more users -- hence, the continual refusal to develop a feature to share photos privately with non-members. If you want to share photos of your family gathering (that you don't want publicly accessible to every nutjob in the world), you have to limit it to "Family" or "Friends," who can only be other Flickr members. It would be trivial to allow users to create a hidden photo album with an obscure URL, and then only distribute that to people they want to see the photos, but this request has been ignored for upwards of a year or more now.

Re:Zoomr?

[Hijacked Public]

Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature

What manner of abomination will be forced upon us next? Plagues of locusts? The earth yielding of its dead? Who knows what will come next when we live in a time when a for profit corporation can make a service available free of charge and then commit such obvious atrocities as trying to get some money back out of it.

I, for one, just did not see this coming. I uploaded thousands of pictures to someone else's server and spent hours and hours and hours typing in metadata. Maybe I paid some kind of monthly fee and maybe I didn't, and maybe I read the User Agreement that stated that at any given time and for any reason, or no reason at all, the company that owns all this stuff I keep sending them can pull the plug on the whole works and all the work I put into it would be vaporized. Regardless, I expected that forever and ever this service would be made available to me, on terms set by me, by virtue of my having spent a lot of my time on it and becoming emotionally invested in its 'community'.

Re:Zoomr?

[cetialphav]

everyone seems pretty universally convinced that it's gone downhill since then. (Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature, e.g. printing.)

I wouldn't say universally. I can't think of a single instance where things have gone downhill. Features have definitely been added, and the site has become a lot more reliable. They used to have tons of downtime before they got the benefits of Yahoo's infrastructure.

I don't think Flickr makes a lot of money from the printing. In fact, you really have to look for that feature. There was a lot of demand from users for printing. Flickr did it because people really, really wanted it.

it's pretty obvious that Yahoo bought Flickr for its userbase, and the whole idea is to develop Flickr users into users of Yahoo's other (ad-laden) services

Is it that bad for someone to try to run a profitable business? Why else would Yahoo buy Flickr? Why else does Google provide free maps and email? Of course they are in the ad business. Of course they want to expand the number of people who see their ads. They aren't trying to hide that from anyone.

Re:Zoomr?

[BandwidthHog]

I guess I just see it as such a waste to clone something like that; if you’re gonna put forth the effort required to get something like that up and running, how about some improvement? I’m a pretty serious FlickrWhore, and I sure as hell don’t think it’s a perfect paradigm with no room for improvement.

But then again, maybe in six months I’ll be a huge ZoomrWhore instead. Who can say?

Re:Zoomr?

[Riktov]

>>I've been a fan of Mike Hawk's photography...

Wow, mine can't take pictures. (Say it out loud... and his name is actually Thomas.)

Re:Zoomr?

[BandwidthHog]

Wow, mine can't take pictures.

Mine’s jealous of my 300mm lens.

and his name is actually Thomas

Yeah, I realized my mistake when discussing it over dinner with my girlfriend. Oh well.

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?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[CmdrGravy]

Not only that his every second post also seems to drop in the fact that Zoooomr is an amazing alternative to Flickr !

I went there to see and the site just sat there with a little loading icon in the corner and refused to do anything else ! Maybe it was overwhelmed or something but that's not an ideal advertisment.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

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

No. How would disclosing that much of the criticism is being lead by a competitor of Yahoo lead anyone to conclude that Yahoo is evil? Obviously this disclosure was intended to led you to at least consider the opposite possibility, that Thomas Hawk is stirring up the fuss for his own purposes. You will note, in fact, that it managed to lead you to exactly that conclusion. Understand yet?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[nine-times]

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

Seems more like an ad to me. "Yahoo is evil. Oh, by the way, on a totally unrelated topic, I have a competing product...."

Re:Conflict of Interest

[el americano]

"Anyone else see..."

Everyone else saw it. They were trying to make that point. Glad you caught it.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Kuvter]

Personally I thought he was completely un-biased.

(I may loose the funny rating for this, but I used a Yahoo log-in from the start and it works well, no spam from Yahoo either.)

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:An anonymous READER?

[TubeSteak]

If you're using a free account, stop bitching. They're giving it to you for free!

Ummm... in many cases, it's the large body of free users that creates a situation where a company can offer for-fee accounts & draw in people who are willing to pay for one.

If all of Flickr's free users fled overnight... well, there's goes the social part of the Flickr experience.

I suspect that didn't occur to you when you wrote your post. It's easy to just say STFU leecher, but there's more to a community than who's paying for what.

Re:An anonymous READER?

[Thuktun]

Week one was spent checking out the fit birds who came from the other schools, [...]

We met a lad on our first day who was introduced as Logger. Initially he seemed more popular than most of the council estate white trash I schooled with, as alot of his junior school mates seemed at pains to introduce him to the rest of the school.

In hindsight, I ought to have been suspicious, this was, after all, the eighties, "john's not mad" was still fresh in our pre adolescent minds, and "joey deacon" was still the insult de jour. Hooodam, that's some kinda furrin speak, there.

Re:An anonymous READER?

[darkstar949]

Ok, that's fair in regards to the free users, but what about the paying users? If you were paying $XX a month or a year for a service and one of those services is a being about to use a non-Yahoo ID login, then wouldn't you be a bit annoyed when they change the rules on you? Personally, I can see where a lot of the paying users are coming from - if you are paying for a service and they change the rules on you they should either give you a chance to get your money back or find a way to provide a compromise for the paying members.

Re:An anonymous READER?

[drinkypoo]

I suspect that didn't occur to you when you wrote your post. It's easy to just say STFU leecher, but there's more to a community than who's paying for what.

No, my point is that pissing, moaning, and whining won't help you no matter how many pairs of lips you have. The only thing that can help you is to DO something about it. All the whiners complaining about how evil Yahoo is but not leaving are showing the entire world what the clever people have already figured out, namely that you can abuse people quite a bit and they will put up with it as long as they can complain.

The only way to send a message to Yahoo that these sorts of actions are unacceptable (although frankly, if you don't trust yahoo, what the hell are you doing using a service owned by them? the acquisition should have had you running for a competing service long since) is to leave. Go use another service. Otherwise, you can complain all you want, and you will simply be ignored, because it is abundantly clear that you don't actually care. You just want to complain. Why should Yahoo change in response to your whining? If you're not going to do anything, their contempt for you is utterly justified.

Frankly this situation is precisely identical to the fact that while the majority of Americans do not trust their government (something like 45% do) we re-elect the incumbent to congress 95% of the time. Complaining doesn't help! You have to do something.

Re:An anonymous READER?

[CrackedButter]

I've failed repeatedly to understand why people paid a subscription service for a Beta product in the first place. Its in Gamma now.

Conflict of Interest?

[grenz]

Is it really that serious an issue when the man leading the charge is the CEO of a rival company? Next you'll be telling me that the CEO of AMD thinks that Intel is making inferior products.

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[xENoLocO]

eh, "CEO".... isn't the kid 17?

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[drinkypoo]

eh, "CEO".... isn't the kid 17?

Eh, "Regent of Macedonia"... isn't the kid 16?

Your ageism is as unwelcome as sexism or racism. Correct yourself.

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[imsabbel]

Sorry, no.
The only peolpe i have ever seen to bitch about "ageism" are 15 year old assholes that really live up to all those stereotypes.
Hint: after puperty you will be smarter, so shut up now.

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, no. The only peolpe i have ever seen to bitch about "ageism" are 15 year old assholes that really live up to all those stereotypes.

Well, I'm 29. So now you have seen someone else say it, and now you need to stop claiming that no one over 15 ever complained about ageism. Although frankly, I'm quite sure that many others over the age of 15 have complained to you, and you're simply a liar.

Hint: after puperty you will be smarter, so shut up now.

Point the first: s/peolpe/people/, s/puperty/puberty/

Point the second: Intelligence typically does not change much throughout one's life, although experience and thus ability do. This is exceptionally unfortunate for you, as you cannot look forward to any significant improvement that might bring you up to the level, say, of an orangutan.

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[xENoLocO]

My point is, he's a kid in a basement. When he has more than himself as the only employee, and a company with some direction instead of just a website, then I think he could garter himself with the CEO title.

I'm not trying to put the guy down, he has a nice site and he's obviously going to go somewhere in life, even if it's not with zooomr.

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[AchiIIe]

Thank you for pointing that out, captain.

*Salute*

Re:Conflict of Interest?

[kchrist]

I think the point is that "CEO" does not carry its usual weight and meaning when you're talking about a six or seven person startup.

Prominent user, eh?

[hpa]

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.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that the CEO of a direct competitor would be a prominent user of Flickr?

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[jandrese]

Have you seen Zoomr? It's obvious that he's spending a lot of time on Flickr just copying every single design element from them.

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[suffe]

Actually he entered the Zoomr picture after the base flickr-rippof-design was in place. He doesn't show any signs of wanting to diverge from there, but it most certainly is not his creation.

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[Matt Perry]

Am I the only one who finds it strange that the CEO of a direct competitor would be a prominent user of Flickr?

You don't think companies keep track of what their competitors do?

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[oliderid]

It looks like the guy was a heavy flickr user before launching/joining zooomr.. He claimed to have written books on flickr and leading several groups/forums inside this web service.

Anyway...This is a new marketing strategy. If he did this intentionally , he is a genius.

All he had to do is :
- To write an article on his blog. Just to say how these modifications piss him off.
- To choose a catchy title
- Post it on digg.com (yes, self digg)
- Use RSS
- And to mention that he is the CEO of a competitor.

So simple...

and the magic happens. Their six modest servers have been hit by a wave of new subscriptions. Now everybody know their name. Everybody know thy are the flickr competitor. They are the new "indies" in front of the Evil corporate Yahoo behemoth.

I love Internet :-)

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[kabocox]

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.
Am I the only one who finds it strange that the CEO of a direct competitor would be a prominent user of Flickr?

I just took it to mean that even though Flickr now sucks, it doesn't suck nearly as hard and as much as his service Zoomr.

Re:Prominent user, eh?

[kchrist]

In this case, "CEO" means "one of the half dozen people involved".

When did it become cool for startups and independent businesses to adopt these pretentious corporate-style titles? Isn't one of the points of doing your own thing to get away from this sort of BS?

I'm out

[z80]

I registered very early for Flickr, back when it was in beta and you could email the founders with questions and get a reply within five minutes. I became a paying member last year but this fsckup with the Yahoo login (I don't like, or trust, Yahoo) made me delete my Flickr account.

Re:I'm out

[maxume]

How does 'I don't like, or trust, Yahoo' not apply to using your Flickr account prior to them changing things?

There are probably something like 1000 people who care. It doesn't have to be that big a pain in the ass before they simply start ignoring people. Sure, they don't get to do it very often or they end up with no users, but when it comes down to making special accommodations for a very small number of users in order to better service all of their users(maintaining special infrastructure means they aren't doing something else), it isn't that surprising.

Re:I'm out

[carlivar]

So let me get this straight. You became a paying member of Flickr while they were owned by Yahoo yet you refuse to sign up for a Yahoo ID because you don't like or trust Yahoo? Sorry if I fail to understand your reasoning here.

Storm in a tea cup

[CmdrGravy]

The amount of wailing and hair pulling going on over this in the Flickr forums is simply awe inspiring, it's really amusing to see the number of people with no sense of perspective whatsoever.

Anyone who posts a comment such as the one I am about launch into is shouted down immediately and called all sorts of nasty names, this is less amusing and simply disturbing.

It's no big deal, the only difference is that people now have to log in through Yahooo rather than Flickr maintaning a separate login system just for them. Nothing else has changed, the Flickr experience is identical from that moment onwards.

Common complaints are

1) Yahoo will log me off all the time
2) I don't want a "silly" Yahoo login name
3) I am genetically incapable of remembering any more logins
4) I will lose my "old skool" status and reputation
5) Yahoo will send me spam all the time
6) Yahoo are evil and I'm so right on I don't support evil

To which the answers are

1) No it won't ( I have a Yahoo login to Flickr and it has stayed logged in for months now )
2) You still keep your flickr screen name, no one will see your Yahoo name
3) You won't have to remember your old Flickr login anymore and thus have more room in your impoverished memory for a new one
4) Since you are the only person who sees how you login this is a stupid claim based on a worrying sense of misplaced elitism
5) I've had Yahoo e-mail since 1999 and can't remember ever getting any spam off them in all that time and if you don't want to use the e-mail you don't even have to sign up for it
6) Yahoo have owned Flickr for over a year now so if you don't support them on moral grounds why are you still using Flickr in the first place ?

This "old skool" thing is simply ridiculous, ok so you discovered Flickr maybe 6 months before other people did - there are no prizes for this and it has no effect whatsoever on your value to society or as a person in general !

Seriously, they really should just shut up and change their login or shut up and find something else which is happy to accept a huge bunch of whining holier than thou nuisances. Either way they should shut up because it's quite unpleasant listening to this caterwauling.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[basstastic]

Spot on.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[Chess Piece Face]

7) The amount of time spent repeating the signup form over and over to find an available Yahoo handle is getting ridiculous. And the more of these type of forced signups they do, the worse it will become.

Been through the process twice recently - once for some Pepsi contest and later again to get Messenger. Using Messenger legitimately requires signing up and that handle will be used for some time. The Pepsi one I stopped using when the contest ended, thus creating a junk account and robbing another user of the handle pepsidoodoo@yahoo.com (the sixth or seventh but first available handle I could find).

Call me a whiner if you will. But you can't deny that proposing and failing to acquire a handle repeatedly - one handle at a time - is not going to make for happy customers.

Old Skool bonus: I quit using Yahoo! when they took over my Rocketmail account and pulled this same stunt.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[Paulrothrock]

There is a valid complaints. First, I hate having all kinds of different usernames across different sites. I'd much rather log in using my email address than some arbitrary name. It reduces the amount of information I have to remember. And for photo sharing sites, I'd much rather use my actual email address than some arbitrary yahoo ID because I don't get email there.

As someone who develops web apps professionally, I always recommend using your email address as your username, even if the "screen name" that's displayed is different. Why should Flickr be any different?

At any rate, I've moved all my information over to Google, so as long as there's a convenient way to move to Picasa, I'll use it. Besides, I already have my own Gallery 2.0 on my web host space.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[electricalen]

Um, how about

7) My company (like a lot of other companies) bans free web mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo including their login pages, which now also stops me from logging into Flickr.

Answer?

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[teh_chrizzle]

Call me a whiner if you will.

i will: you're whiner.

sorry, i couldn't resist :-)

seriously tho, you are spot on about the junk accounts problem. i would imagine that 75% of those accounts are used by bots and spammers.

i quit using yahoo when the email/IM spam became unbearable and then my account got hijacked.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[Miseph]

Either complain to your company's IT department to change that, or stop using Flickr at work. If they won't change it, then I guess they don't care about your ability to use Flickr while you're there. I really doubt that the corporate prohibition on web mail would hold up against any valid work-related reasons you may have to be writing comments about about drunk cat pictures.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[Innova]

This "old skool" thing is simply ridiculous, ok so you discovered Flickr maybe 6 months before other people did - there are no prizes for this and it has no effect whatsoever on your value to society or as a person in general !

Aha! Here your argument falls apart. This is the kind of nonsense I would expect from someone with a slashdot id > half a mill.

Queue the 3 digit slashdot id replies....

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[wboelen]

Um, how about 7) My company (like a lot of other companies) bans free web mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo including their login pages, which now also stops me from logging into Flickr. Answer?

Your company would probably block flickr too, for the same reason it blocks webmail: it doesn't want you to spend your time re creatively during working hours. You're regarding the issue superficially.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[electricalen]

Ok, perhaps we forgot the issue, and your saying I'm regarding it superficially?

First of all, here is the comment from the parent post that I was responding to:

It's no big deal, the only difference is that people now have to log in through Yahooo rather than Flickr maintaning a separate login system just for them. Nothing else has changed, the Flickr experience is identical from that moment onwards.

It was suggesting that this makes ABSOLUTELY NO difference to the users. I believe that I have proven a case where it makes a difference to me. Yes I can complain to my IT department and no they are not blocking it because they want more work done, it's because they have concluded that free webmail is a source of viruses getting into the company network. So all the comments about how I shouldn't be doing it at work in the first place don't justify that this login consolidation has no negative effect at all.

P.S. How are all of you commenting on this during working hours, get back to work! :)

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[kashani]

Sorry id 702 didn't care enough to respond so he sent me. :-)

kashani

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[ral315]

For the record, I'm pretty sure that Yahoo has sold e-mail addresses.

Example: I got an e-mail address from them at an early age, and to protect my zip code (my parents were deathly afraid someone would find out my identity), I faked my zip code (90210, because it was the first one that came to mind). About a year later, and continuing to today, I get about 10-20 e-mails a day touting Beverly Hills real estate. I gave that fake zip to no other site.

Re:Storm in a tea cup

[rizole]

I could have missed a checkbox somewhere along the line but I merged my flickr and yahoo accounts today and I keep having to type my password in.

If flickr doesn't stay logged in for me like it did, I'll think twice.

"Many users are calling this BS

[popo]

> "Many users are calling this BS, saying it's all about Yahoo marketing its other properties to Flickr's user-base."

And this is somehow unacceptable? They're a portal with multiple service offerings.
They also gain tremendous synergies from integrating these services, as do all portals.

Why does the OP feel he has the right to be shielded somehow from this integration, or from
Yahoo's other free service offerings?

This is a little OT, but I have to say that personally I think Yahoo is on a tear and no one has
noticed. IMHO Yahoo's mail beta blows huge holes in Gmail, which has a wacky threading
system and an interface that's damn hard to love.

Re:"Many users are calling this BS

[NullProg]

And this is somehow unacceptable? They're a portal with multiple service offerings.
They also gain tremendous synergies from integrating these services, as do all portals.

You forgot to say they also...

optimize seamless communities
generate vertical e-services
leverage synergistic convergence

    and best of all

engage e-business content

Enjoy,

Beware the ides of March

[inselaffe]

Was it Caesr who said that?

Re:Beware the ides of March

[morgan_greywolf]

Close but no cigar.

The line is from the play 'Julius Caesar' by William Shakespeare. The character who said it was simply called the 'Soothsayer'. The Ides of March (March 15) is the day that Julius Caesar is asassinated in the play.

Re:Beware the ides of March

[Omestes]

Foresr? You mean? Perhaps fosr? Why do they hate e so? Its like Apple's annoying i-philia. ephobia. Perhaps it just means we need to run it on an eMachine, to get the complete package. Damn capitalists, and their... er... something.

Direct competitor to Flickr ?

[Qwavel]

Seems like rather an important tid-bit at the end there...

"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."

So, they are further integrating Flickr into Yahoo, what's wrong or surprising about that?

yahoo and big consolidation

[iggymanz]

when I got my home at&t/yahoo adsl account, they made my synch my yahoo chat and myyahoo login id with the signon and email. guesss they know what I'm doing now

Re:Maybe I missed something here, but...

[Colonel Angus]

$25USD/year if they're on a Pro account.

But I digress... this is all really childish. The only thing these people have to do is a) create a free throw-away Yahoo! account, b) log in using this free throw-away account, c) tell flickr to use their preferred account (ie, their original account used when signing up) for all communications and, the hardest of all, d) stop pretending like they have more than 3000 people that they keep in regular touch with.

I think those flipping out over this are making mountains out of molehills here.

Same thing happened

[Some_Llama]

When they merged with SBC, i used to have a pacbell.net login and email address but after the merger they wanted me to create a new yahoo ID to use instead.. i just ignored them for my main account, but for sub accounts i followed suit and was rewarded with a host of "free" applications that they wanted me to install to continue using their services (although direct setup of POP3 still works) and a new "improved" home page type "portal" that was full of obtrusive ads. UGH!

If I didn't game so much I might have looked into Comcast (which also makes me mad as there are only 2 options for DSL) but i value my low ping/lag.

Re:Same thing happened

[yodleboy]

christ you sound like my mother in law. you do know that you don't HAVE to let them install /install yourself all the "custom browsers", media players etc? i have yet to have an ISP that "requires" that, and have had no issues using the internet without their baggage installed. you can always uninstall you know... so far this has held true for AT&T Cable, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, SBC DSL.
the m-in-law was amazed that she didn't have to have her pc clogged up with that crap and could just use Firefox...

Re:Same thing happened

[stu42j]

If you had switched to Comcast you'd be switching all over again to Time Warner.

Re:Same thing happened

[Some_Llama]

"christ you sound like my mother in law."

Sounds like maybe the problem isn't your mother-in-law, sounds like the problem is that you are a self absorbed, self important son in law.

Where did I say that I installed any of their freeware crap? Maybe that's what you assumed, but if you had cared enough to listen to what I was saying instead of rushing to tell me how stupid I was then maybe you would have gotten what I was saying...

No wonder she hates you.

Re:Maybe I missed something here, but...

[Rob T Firefly]

Before I deleted it, my pro account cost me $25 per year. Not a lot, but not a freebie either.

As an interesting aside, I had to merge a Yahoo ID with my Flickr account before it would let me sign in to delete my Flickr account over the issue of forcing me to merge a Yahoo ID with my Flickr account. Fun!

yahoo login works fine - no downside

[Splork]

i've been using a yahoo login on flickr for years. i receive -zero- marketing from yahoo and the login process is hidden anyways since a cookie stored in my browser keeps me logged in. theres no reason to dislike this change. get over it.

Re:yahoo login works fine - no downside

[macshit]

the login process is hidden anyways since a cookie stored in my browser keeps me logged in. theres no reason to dislike this change. get over it.

Seriously. It's just not an issue.

What's amusing is that "zooomr" (the flickr competitor run by the guy who's noted in the article for stirring up this latest round of moaning) has a login process which actually sucks much more than yahoo's -- it seems to never remember your login between sessions, and has a funny "web 2.0" type login dialogue that doesn't work with browser completion etc.

[Zooomr has its cool points, but it's a far less polished product in general than flickr, and lacks some of flickr's nicest features (like the great groups system).]

SmugMug

[3m_w018]

I've been pretty happy with these guys:

http://www.smugmug.org/

Granted, they don't have the kind of communities that Flickr does, but I find them more than sufficient for my photos...

Re:SmugMug

[gavinpquinn]

I rarely share photos, but when I do I put them in places where people can find them in some context. I'd rather use them to help others... http://www.grapheety.com Plus its more fun...

It's a drag.

[Kadin2048]

One of my biggest problems with Flickr is that it requires a Yahoo ID.

It's just obnoxious; it makes signing up for it into a much bigger deal, than making a one-shot account (like on Slashdot, or any other discrete service). It just makes it feel like more of a commitment.

I can't tell you how many times I've had people ask me how they can comment on my Flickr photos, and I have to tell them that they need a Flickr name, and they look into it, until they realize it's going to mean getting a Yahoo ID, and that's a big turn off. (My entire family falls into this category; none of them want to get a Yahoo ID. Probably because they're confusing it with Yahoo Mail, but it doesn't matter. The point is people don't want one.)

I always wished that I had got on to Flickr before the instituted the Yahoo ID requirement, because I can never remember what my idiotic Yahoo ID is (it's not the same as my Flickr username), and thus I really only ever use Flickr from computers that have it saved/cookied.

Basically: Yahoo ID's are a drag. I don't want to "build a relationship" with Yahoo. I don't want any of their other crummy services. I just want Flickr, and so do a lot of other people. They've shot themselves in the foot with this requirement -- as I said, I personally know quite a few people who've decided not to touch Flickr because of the mandatory Yahoo ID -- and now they're going to make the hole a little bigger.

Re:It's a drag.

[JFitzsimmons]

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

Re:It's a drag.

[Ucklak]

One of my biggest problems is the fact that the UI sucks.

Granted, a free image hosting site is great, I'm not knocking that.
The UI is horrible and I can't stand albums that are on that site.

There is some pretty amazing imagery there and it's a shame it's on such a sorry site.
It feels incomplete.

Re:It's a drag.

[homer_ca]

That's what I thought too. Sure, Yahoo would like you to to log in to Flickr with a Yahoo account that you use for everything else because then they could aggregate all your browsing into a marketing profile, but Yahoo accounts are free and you don't have to give them any real personal info. Make one just for Flickr and clear your cookies if you log into another Yahoo account.

Re:It's a drag.

[Eric in SF]

Yahoo! Terms of Service are clear - supply any fake info on your Yahoo! Loging and you run the risk of having your Yahoo! and Flickr accounts deleted without warning. Create a fake account at your own risk.

Re:It's a drag.

[Hijacked Public]

As you appear to have read their Terms of Service I would guess that you are aware that Yahoo is under no obligation to actually make their service available to you at all, fake data or not?

Tomorrow, if they just decice to call it quits with regard to Flickr or any of the other services they run, their Terms of Service support their just shutting it down entirely without any notice to anyone.

Re:It's a drag.

[CrackedButter]

Well it is in 'Gamma' stage for a reason...

Re:It's a drag.

[UnknownSoldier]

Gamma is _after_ Alpha, and Beta, not before.

It's pre-Alpha, unless it has all the basic features implemented (whether they work or not)

Re:It's a drag.

[Eric in SF]

Yes, I'm quite aware of that - I've yet to use an online service that didn't have that in their TOS. All of my photos are backed up independently of Flickr and I use IPTC to store descriptions and keywords with the file - they're not locked into Flickr. Yahoo! has been very aggressive at policing their users for TOS violation - so much that I would not be comfortable creating a fake login there. I use fake logins all over the Internet, but not for a service that I literally spend hours a day using. Some people play WOW, I use Flickr. It's not the loss of my photos I'm worried about - it's the sudden involuntary removal from a community. It's a trust thing. I held my nose when Flickr was bought by Yahoo! and held out hope a solution would be found that allowed the early adopters to continue using Flickr without a Yahoo! ID, but that didn't happen. Yahoo! as a brand is dead to me and a lot of people. It was painful, but making the decision to leave Flickr rather than get a Yahoo! ID was a no brainer.

Re:It's a drag.

[CrackedButter]

Yes I'm well aware of Gamma's place in the Greek Alphabet thank you and how these letters are used in the world of software development. The point is, the service is still incomplete (It use to be in Beta, so they are making progress) so why moan about changes in a service which is ... *drum roll please*... incomplete?

Re:It's a drag.

[Kesh]

How is this any different from every other website in existence?

Re:It's a drag.

[nath_de]

That's exactly the thing. I am one of the old Flickr members (and a paying member) and I don't want a Yahoo ID. I guess most old members that haven't yet made the switch don't want a Yahoo ID. I have invited a lot of people to Flickr and quite a few didn't register because they didn't want a Yahoo ID.

Re:It's a drag.

[emurphy42]

I just looked, and all I saw was section 6c which prohibits impersonating a person or entity. Entering info that's merely incomplete (e.g. first and last initials) or obviously fictional (e.g. "Joe Blow") does not qualify. If I overlooked something, then please cite the relevant section number or text or something.

Re:It's a drag.

[Eric in SF]

3. YOUR REGISTRATION OBLIGATIONS In consideration of your use of the Service, you represent that you are of legal age to form a binding contract and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction. You also agree to: (a) provide true, accurate, current and complete information about yourself as prompted by the Service's registration form (the "Registration Data") and (b) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data to keep it true, accurate, current and complete. If you provide any information that is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, or Yahoo! has reasonable grounds to suspect that such information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, Yahoo! has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service (or any portion thereof).

From: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Re:It's a drag.

[elysiuan]

Whatever.

This Web2.0 "Its not complete!!" attitude is a complete and total cop out. Its just a way to shirk responsibility for having to claim that anything they do works properly.

If a product has shipped (being available to your target audience for use would apply here) then it is not in Beta.

It is in fact a release. 'Beta' would have been what they did after 'Alpha', namely feature freeze and testing to make sure it works.

Re:It's a drag.

[zxnos]

yahoo is wierd. my office uses yahoo webhosting and we need a yahoo id to remotely check our email. it is really annoying actually becuase the less savy ask "why do i need and extra step to check my email?" perhaps companies should consult non-techie people to test systems. what is glaringly obvious to the designer may not be to the user.

Re:It's a drag.

[CrackedButter]

You're still not listening. You're arguing the same point. Let me make it real simple. Don't pay for an unfinished product.

Re:It's a drag.

[poliopteragriseoapte]

This is funny. I create a new Yahoo ID whenever I want to sign up for something that I know in the long run will generate spam - so I can keep the emails on the yahoo account, which I will then stop looking at after a short while. I must have created nearly a hundred Yahoo IDs, of which I remember at most 3-4!! Clearly, some people have a different resistance to Yahoo IDs :-)

Re:It's a drag.

[delinear]

It sounds to me like the one you should be complaining about is Flickr, for selling out to Yahoo in the first place. All Yahoo are doing is streamlining the operation so that supporting it and adding new features in the future will be easier - surely that has to be a win for users? Sure, some users now have to sign up for the ID, but that's not really any more hassle than finding an alternative photo hosting site and signing up with them, is it?

As for people viewing photos, ditto them having to sign up elsewhere vs. signing up with Yahoo (and add to that the fact that, if enough people switch to a different service, the chances of it being acquired and the same thing happening down the line are pretty high). It seems that, if anything, moving to a different service is likely to mean more hassle for your photo viewers, since they'll still probably have to sign up to leave comments, it's just that if they want to leave comments on Flickr and a different service, they'll have twice as much sign-up hassle.

Really, this is a non-issue. If you don't want to use any of Yahoo's other services, don't use them.

Awe-inspiring

[aftk2]

The gnashing of teeth over these decisions is simply awe-inspiring. Basically, the points of contention boil down to:
1. Flickr wants you to signin with a yahoo account.
2. Flickr will limit you to 3000 contacts.
3. Flickr will limit the number of tags on your photos to 75.

That's it. In response:
1. Jesus. Just get a Yahoo ID. Can't find your precious flickr ID on Yahoo (since Yahoo has a mizillion members)? Just take your ID and add "flickr" at the end. It'll probably be available. You can still get email updates at whatever email address you like, and this change doesn't change anything about your nickname on the site! This is LITERALLY a change to the login process, and ONLY the login process.

2. I suspect this measure is probably the first move in Flickr announcing some other social networking features (Friends or some such, some other data type), that will allow you to do much the same thing you do with contacts, allowing contacts to be, you know, PEOPLE YOU FUCKING CONTACT!

3. This move is great. Using the Flickr API can get downright stupid when you attempt to browse a tag and the same damn pictures come up, because some unattractive lady has tagged her picture with a million different keywords. Stop tagspam.

Seriously...what a pathetic display of whining (the vast majority) and opportunism (Mr. Hawk)

Re:Awe-inspiring

[ubuwalker31]

I think you pretty much summed up my thoughts about flickr in a nutshell. I mean, wtf is the big deal about getting a free yahoo e-mail account? Except for the fact that you can't forward mail from it anymore...

On the otherhand, I hope that in exchange for having to sign in with a yahoo account and limiting contacts and tags, that they will increase the upload limit on photos. I tried to upload 100 pictures from my vacation, and flickr crapped out on me saying that my monthly upload alotment was used up. Screw that. Thats why I use photobucket.

Re:Awe-inspiring

[csteinle]

The upload limit for pro accounts was removed a while ago, and at the same time the limit for free accounts was increased significantly.

Re:Awe-inspiring

[hxnwix]

1. Users don't want it.

2. Users don't want it.

3. Users don't want it.

4. Users don't want it.

5. Users don't want it.

6. Users don't want it.

7. Shills don't want it.

8. Apologists say that it's not that bad.

9. Yahoo tried this before but were repulsed by their own users.

10. This is change for the sake of cross marketing benefits, not for reduction of image tag spam.

Re:Awe-inspiring

[gullevek]

how much? 3 users 300? 3000? I doubt it will be many. There will be a lot of whiners and they will be happy to get some more attention, because they stand up The Man. But the rest will just shrug and move on.

Seriously, thats just really stupid behaviour of people. People love to whine (it seems). Always reminds me of Matrix, the happy one never worked :)

Re:Get a Picasa account

[TigerPlish]

And shut down you yahoo and Flicrkrck account anyway Meh, Picasa the app is fairly cool, Picasa the website / photo sharing site is worthless, imo.

Flickr's coolness comes from its Interestingness algorithm, something Picasa lacks.

Alternatives?

[dcormier]

I am an old skool member (as Flickr likes to call us) and I'm serriously considering ditching my Flickr account for something else, even though just last week I paid for a 1 year Pro account. I was considering doing this before I saw anything by Thomas Hawk. I have a number of reasons.

The problem is finding something else.

I've looked at Zooomr. I found it a bit slugish and unpolished. I don't mind that, but I wasn't encouraged when I could find no obvious way to contact someone with suggestions or questions, even after creating an account and logging in. One thing is what appears to be somewhat soft IE7 support (notes on photos don't work properly, for example). Whether you like IE or not, it does hold a very large part of the browser market and should be supported on any site that is even thinking about competing with the 800-lb gorillas.

What else is out there? I know Flickr is the biggest, but what other site has the community, ease of navigation and browsing (another thing a bit lacking on Zooomr, but that shouldn't be hard for them to tweak), and quality (I know no one has the quantity) of content that Flickr has?

Re:Alternatives?

[DogDude]

So, what you're saying is that Flickr is the best thing out there for whatever Flickr does (I can't figure out what the point is... to show off your own photographs?), but you're worried about some legal technicality in Yahoo's Terms of Service? Are you serious?

Re:Alternatives?

[senzafine]

Try using Photagious. I believe it's a higher quality product than Flickr. It doesn't have as much of a focus on social networking but for anyone who is serious about their photographs it's a great service.

Tour of Photagious
A slideshow I made
My photos on Photagious

Re:Alternatives?

[Quixote]

I believe it's a higher quality product than Flickr.

I'm sure you do, seeing that you're the CTO of the site.

Is it so hard to add a disclaimer?

Re:Alternatives?

[senzafine]

Nope. Sorry about that. My being CTO is plastered all over the place. I wasn't trying to hide the face (else I would have posted anonymously).

My resume clearly states it too.

Try Tabloo

[Jafafa Hots]

its better than flikr anyway.

Re:Breaking: Free users don't have rights

[metlin]

> Oh my god! If you don't pay for the service, they may delete your content.

Umm, which part of, "some of us paying customers" did not make sense to you?

If your Yahoo! email account goes to hell for some reason, you lose your Flickr account and everything in with it. This has happened to a lot of folks, and people do not want this happening to them.

And since we are - I repeat - paying customers - we thought we should have a say in the matter.

flickr letter translated

[acomj]

I thought this was a good translation of the yahoo /flickr letter.

http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/01/31/yah ooflickr_get_the_bullyboy_tactics_out.php

Not all of us are weeners

[Dan100]

Until yesterday I was also an "old skool" member (and I'm also a Pro account owner). When I got the mail announcing the change, I thought a bit about for a while then said "sod it" and merged my account.

Was there any difference in my Flickr experience after the switch? No.

Re:Not all of us are weeners

[giginger]

That's exactly what I did. At first I thought "Why should I?". Then I decided it was just laziness on my part. I don't really care if Yahoo collects info on my flickr browsing habits.

More old skool then you

[WizKidr]

As some who has been with Flickr since day 0, and I'm among the old old skool members, hearkening back to the pre-Flickr days of gameneverending, I don't feel I've been abandoned. When Flickr wanted me to change my log-in the first time I dragged my feet, letting them work all the kinks out, which they seem to have done. When I got the email the other day I made the switch and have had no problems. Besides counting this time I've only had to "log-on" Flickr twice. If you want something to whine about whine about bringing back "Flickr Live", or "gameneverending." PS: I have the record for the longest running user icon...

... and?

[PeekabooCaribou]

File this one under the not-a-big-deal department.

Please stop with the verb-r

[gavinpquinn]

Why is everyone ripping off a naming convention? I hope Flickr and yahoo sue every verb-r rip-off out there. Have some creativity? Most of these -r sites don't even make their own look!

Yahoo Told Everyone About This Back in 2005

[macbort]

I'm completely missing the point of all this outrage toward Yahoo/Flickr here. These same "early adopters" are whining about the exact same thing they complained about almost 1 1/2 years ago (late August 2005).

This Yahoo account requirement is not new news - they let people know about it a long time ago, and have even extended the drop-dead date from "sometime in 2006" to early 2007.

I'm one of the "old-schoolers" and made the change to the Yahoo account last year - it wasn't a big deal. It's just a frickin' web app...

Re:Yahoo Told Everyone About This Back in 2005

[cobalt123]

Wrote a long reply to the original post and of course this Old Skool member of flickr could not remember her correct password in slashdot.org, urk! So, gist of my concern is that I am an original member with a paid account at flickr for the sum of $41.95. I would never have paid money to flickr had I known it would be purchased by yahoo.com. I paid to support a straight-forward company who provided the services I needed. Like many Pro account members, I paid it directly to flickr.com and did so knowing that I was directly supporting a fine company with great attention to its clients. What is so "Old Skool" about this kind of transaction? Seems to me it is a traditional value, money for services, and little if any hidden "cost". I left msn.com groups and communities 3 years ago for the intrustions to privacy and spam, with pop-ups and the like because of that COST. I've had yahoo.com for over 7 years now as a completely separate business email webhost and pay for that premium service. However I have experienced poor customer service, being locked out of my account for cause never determined, had a huge increase in spam mail (what kind of malarky is the "new, improved Spam Filter" and the daily "Thanks for reporting Spam" messages!) It doesn't work well, end game scenario. Now I find that I will have to reconsider membership to flickr.com too. The COST is more than I want to bear. I have good reason and experience telling me that this COST is a pain in the rear. Who needs it! There will be many other options I can go to, and my feet are talkin'.

Re:Yahoo Told Everyone About This Back in 2005

[macbort]

Good for you. Walking away is your choice. Merging accounts is Flickrs/Yahoos. You should thank them for making it easy to pull all of your content out.

Re:Yahoo Told Everyone About This Back in 2005

[cobalt123]

Why do you say I should thank flickr/yahoo for "making it easy to pull all of your content out"? If you mean that my options are any of these three:
1. Manually delete images or manually copy back to my hard drive
2. API allows use of the FlickrDown app so I can get copies of each set I made with an off-flickr tool
3. Pay flickr for a back-up CD

Then I should just be grateful? Not EASY to pull all my content out.

Exploring present idea of downgrading from Pro account to freebie, like 95% of all present flickr members.

Re:Get over it

[suffe]

No, it's not. You can use it as such but a surprisingly high percentage of users pay. If Slashdot would have such high numbers the editors could probably drive around in Ferraris again and play it like it was the late 90s.

Re:Breaking: Free users don't have rights

[makomk]

Oh my god! If you don't pay for the service, they may delete your content.

No; the whole point is that if you switch away from a completely different service (an ISP) they may delete your content on their free Flickr service (free to everyone, remember, not just members of that ISP) if you've done what they try and get you to do, and used the same Yahoo! ID for both. (If you don't, have fun logging out and back in again every time you switch between your ISP mail account and Flickr...)

Maybe...

[msimm]

But I've started projects simply because an idea *I* really liked wasn't quite done in the way I thought would be best. Then you've got the uphill battle of competing with a likely pretty good service thats already entrenched.

I don't know this guy or his scruples, but that *could* be a reasonable scenario (or he's just a jerk).

Two things

[zecg]

First, this is not a big deal - Yahoo account is completely separate from Flickr account (which is not deleted if not used, for instance) and you can even name another account as your primary account for information e-mail. "Old school" members can keep their Flickr sign-in names and everything. And they even promised to enable users to move their Flickr accounts to different Yahoo accounts later on. So, really, get over it.

But I wanted to say something for a long time - I get spam because of del.icio.us since Yahoo bought it. And I'm sure it's because of them. How do I know? Because I started learning Japanese and for a time the ONLY place I've used kanji was in del.icio.us tags (photographs and interesting - and ). And I immediately started getting spam in japanese on the e-mail which del.icio.us is supposed to keep hidden. It MIGHT be a coincidence, but seems fishy.

Re:Breaking: Free users don't have rights

[zecg]

No, that's FUD. They are very explicit about never deleting your Flickr account, whether you are paying or not, whether you are using your Yahoo account or not.

I think it's important to note...

[93 Escort Wagon]

I just created a Yahoo account, and merged my Flickr account with it. I'll never use this Yahoo account for anything else, so I guess it's not that big a deal - but by default they do opt you into a bunch of crap.

So you might want to go into your Yahoo account preferences and opt back out of all the stuff they try to tie you into.

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.

No big deal

[mike3k]

I don't understand the outrage. The change has no practical effect. I switched to using my Yahoo ID long ago and it didn't affect anything. My visible user name & photo URL remains the same. It didn't affect my pro status. You're the only one who knows that you're logging in with a Yahoo ID - everyone else sees exactly the same thing they saw when you logged in with a Flickr ID.

cross marketing

[hxnwix]

Users with old accounts see flickr adverts but not yahoo mail adverts, and they are less likely to be sucked into using other yahoo services. Even though this move will drive away some users, bless their hearts, it may still be profitable: yahoo id users see more adverts than legacy users.

Assuming that legacy users don't otherwise use yahoo, that 1/3rd of the legacy users will never use flickr again and that yahoo id users see 2x the adverts, this will be a win. Of course, some stubborn people don't like being overwhelmed by in-your-face space-wasting flashy yahoo advertisements. For them, there is gmail and, well, not flickr.

ummm how much is your time worth?

[cez]

Of course they have a copy of the pictures they've uploaded. But would you want to spend hours if not days re-upping pictures you've already uploaded over the years?

Re:Reason #7

[Achromatic1978]

Makes no sense. I've just merged my account - there is /zero/ requirement to make your yahoo email address the default destination for mail from Flickr. It doesn't even ask you to.

It's Worse Than You All Realize!

[darthservo]

Be forewarned!!! I was an oldskool member for quite a while and also received this email message. Being the proficient Flickrite I am, I had multiple oldskool accounts. I figured, "OK, I'll use one of them to see what happens when I migrate." Boy, was I in trouble...

The moment I finished the 'merge', my account's photo stream was suddenly held hostage by Yahoo! They said something about a Nigerian operation they were heading up and if I didn't provide them more money from my bank account, 12,000 starving children would die because of my negligence. What's more, my computer then showed I was infected with the "w32.D13SuX0r!!#@!Y@400!pWNedU!!!@!#" virus. Immediately after the message appeared, I rushed to check my photo storage on the computer and was completely distraught when I watched each one of my photos receive a Yahoo! logo stretching across its entire length. Then my hard drive burst into a giant fireball consuming my tower while my speakers replayed an audio clip of Hitler endlessly chanting "Yahoo! Yahoo!". At that point, my wife came home and saw the mess. I told her everything that happened. She said she could never forgive me for merging and that she'd see me and her lawyer in divorce court, and then maced me.

Before Yahoo! remotely formats my phone's ROM, I sit here blurry eyed typing this out on my keypad to warn you all! I am now left without an online medium to publish my photos of family BBQs and my goldfish Steve (who died because of the fire)...all because of merging!

Re:It's Worse Than You All Realize!

[CmdrGravy]

I hear you brother by contrast I got off likely, I think.

When I signed up Yahoo! forced me authorise a Yahoo! powered ethnic cleansing mission somewhere in Africa, the mercanceries wages would be paid by selling the photos of my kids to prominent paedophile rings and the authorisation box only had an OK button on it, no CANCEL or QUIT or anything so if I wanted my Flickr I had to agree.

Once I'd signed up I got an e-mail from Yahoo! explaining that I was responsible for funding and directing the slaughter of hundreds innocent women and children and that they would hand a dossier of my activities to my local police force ( I had to provide that information in the login process ! ) unless I sold my soul to evil and agreed to act upon their suggestions ( never orders, never instructions ) to promote their evil machinations for the rest of my natural life.

Someone should moderate your post up, it's very amusing !

Sorry, but...

[psykocrime]

I'm sorry but I don't see what the big deal is. It's a freaking signin, who cares if it is a "yahoo id" or a "foobar id?" They could probably migrate all the flickr IDs to Yahoo IDs in the background (if it weren't for name collisions) and nobody would ever be the wiser that their "flickr login" is now also a "yahoo login." Sign up for the Yahoo ID, forget everything Yahoo (except flikr) exists and be done with it.

Quitcherbitchen

[Cervantes]

Dear Flickr users:

Here is a picture of some large nails. Please use them to climb up on the cross and nail yourself to it.
Pls send pix of your dead body.

Sincerely,
Cerv

Seriously, quit yer damn bitchen. Your website got bought out, now some changes are going to happen. They're not resetting everything, they're not forcing you to participate in any of their other services... they're just saying your signin name has to change. Fracking deal with it.

Yahoo bought out Rocketmail sometime in the late 90s. They merged Rocketmail into their userbase. I got a Yahoo ID to use... but my @rocketmail.com address still works! I'd be surprised if there were only a few hundred Rocketmail users left (probably less), but Yahoo keeps that extra domain going, forwarding those emails... and now I've had the same email addy for 10 years. Hell, I still have emails in my inbox from my original Rocketmail account, that were painlessly migrated over.

None of that crap with Hotmail (log in every month or we'll perma-delete you!)... I have gmail, ISP email, etc etc... but I still prefer my Rocketmail/Yahoo. I don't bother with many of their other services, I don't care, and neither do they.

Yahoo gets ubermegabonus points for keeping my rocketmail going all these years. So I say unto you, you whiny little Flickr users...

quitcherbitchen.

Let me count the ways.

[Kadin2048]

1. They are a pain in the ass to sign up for.
They have annoying CAPTCHAs, and their UI makes me want to stab people. The login name you'll probably end up with itself is long (since they have so many accounts, you generally can't get a compact username; you're stuck with JohnDoe48529), and unless you want an equally crappy Flickr username, your Flickr name and your Yahoo ID won't be the same (i.e. Flickr: JohnDoe, Yahoo: JohnDoe48529), which is confusing. It's just one more barrier to entry that keeps non-geeks like my family, who would otherwise be interested in something like Flickr, away.

2. Psychologically, signing up for a "Yahoo ID" seems like a much bigger commitment than "making an account on Flickr." It introduces an extra layer of confusion, when you're trying to get people to sign up for the service. Like I said in my other comment, when people have expressed an interest in getting on Flickr, 90% of them just give up as soon as they figure out that they need to make an account on "another site," i.e. Yahoo, because it's a PITA and seems like a lot of work.

Some of these problems are technical, others are due to Yahoo's implementation; they could have just let you use the same sign-in fields and use a Flickr ID or a Yahoo ID, and then rolled all the Flickr IDs over into Yahoo ID's silently (like eBay did when they bought Half.com -- one day, all the Half.com people got told, 'by the way, your Half.com name is also an eBay account, congratulations'). This would have been fine. But they didn't do that. They make a huge fucking deal about signing in with your Yahoo ID, as if this is something people actually want, and it's not. That's perhaps the most aggravating part of the whole thing.

Re:Let me count the ways.

[carlivar]

2. Psychologically, signing up for a "Yahoo ID" seems like a much bigger commitment than "making an account on Flickr."

Huh? Psychologically? Is this a fancy way of saying "has no basis in fact"?

If this is a "psychology" issue, I have a psychology word: crazy. As in, Flickr users are crazy.

Re:Let me count the ways.

[don_bear_wilkinson]

2. Psychologically, signing up for a "Yahoo ID" seems like a much bigger commitment than "making an account on Flickr."

Huh? Psychologically? Is this a fancy way of saying "has no basis in fact"?

Yes, it is.

It won't surprise you to hear that most people function in a virtual vacuum of analytical and or rational thought. They follow impulses that meet murky needs, avoid things that make them uncomfortable, dance around things that would lead to an examination of their inner workings and the like. So, call it 'psychological', 'emotional' or 'human', people make a minor of choices based on something sensible.

Re:Let me count the ways.

[kisielk]

Well, nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you use Yahoo's completely free service. They're the ones providing it for free to public, as far as I'm concerned they can do whatever they damn well want. Doesn't seem like Flickr is exactly unpopular, despite the Yahoo ID requirement. If you hate it that much, use something else, or run your own gallery website.

Re:Breaking: Free users don't have rights

[macshit]

That's what I've always wondered -- has anyone really lost all their flickr photos because of a yahoo login?

The anti-yahoo complaints I've seen on the flickr groups tend to have a real "how dare they remove our old-sk00l l33t accounts!" tenor to them; mostly they just seem to be whining without much concrete basis. Indeed I've never seen anyone claim to have lost anything, but a lot of rather bizarre claims about what moving to a yahoo account implies (e.g., "it will force you to read all your flickr mail using yahoo mail!!!" which is certainly not true).

What's the problem?

[Jugalator]

Many users are calling this BS, saying it's all about Yahoo marketing its other properties to Flickr's user-base.

And what's the problem with that? OK, "marketing" can be an evil thing, but still, if it's about integrating their feature set better and providing their Flickr users with more functionality, I'd be all for it. Same if Gmail started getting more useful features from other Google services. Is it always bad to see integration for a company to give you more functionality?

CXO

[tfinniga]

My dream job title is CXO: Chief Xtreme Officer

It's not about the backups

[margretli]

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.

It's not about the backups. Any pro of any kind would know to back up their stuff. However, if you are a professional photographer with Flickr as your portfolio, loosing the account means people who are looking for you can not find you any more. Think of it this way, you own a retail store and one day out of the blue your store disappeared, poof, gone. No warning, no notice, just gone. The worst part is, you don't know about it until you go to your store's location. Sure you can open a store some where else, but at the mean time, customers, opportunities, money all going bye bye. Losing an account with Flickr is not as simple as uploading backed up data, especially if you're a pro. Losing a portfolio to an artist is like losing a part of your soul.

Re:It's not about the backups

[Achromatic1978]

Considering you can buy your own domain and webhosting for not much more than the cost of your Flickr subscription, I gotta ask "why?". I'm a professional photographer. I have a Flickr account, but I can't believe this is claimed as a good rationale for the "OMG NOES! MY OLD SKOOL ACCOUNT!".

I use iView Media Pro to metadata, tag, etc my photo collection. It sits on a 1.2TB external drive on my server at home, and is backed up. From there, these tags are exported to Flickr when I do an upload. Likewise to my gallery on my domain. Descriptions, photo attributes. Work once, export everywhere. But even my "Moo" cards only point to my Flickr account as a backup to my domain.

It is annoying to change your username.

[Error27]

In RL I get annoyed when people call me, "Chubs Mc Fatty Fat." That's not my name dang it...

And online how else are people going to knew who you are?

Why is it so hard to understand?

[grrrl]

Face it, people just hate Yahoo.

I use flickr (I have a Yahoo login) and basically I try to pretend that Yahoo doesn't own it (I stopped bothering geotagging after about 5 photos when I realised how crap Yahoo maps are and how slow the tagging was).

I can understand why people are pissed - because they don't want to associate themselves with Yahoo. It doesn't matter that Flickr is owned by Yahoo, that's just an unhappy side effect. I for one would be happy to keep as far away from yahoo as possible. I would rather not even have my username present in the Yahoo system.

I feel the same way about google buying blogspot - I have a crappy blog I hope noone reads, but there is no way I want to merge it with my google account - (sure it's pretty easy to link the two given they have the _same username_) but like some posts above, I'd like to keep some semblance of anominity on the internet - I don't want every fucking account linked together. Sure anyone who is interested can search for my username on some other random site and see if I ahve an account, but I cringe at the thought of the day when you can't even make an account somewhere like flickr without every single other one of your internet presences being linked to it.

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[E IS mC(Square)]

Oh yeah???
At least they are not going to modify your content. Now check this out from Yahoo:

8. PUBLIC CONTENT POSTED TO YAHOO!
(b) With respect to Content you elect to post for inclusion in publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups or that consists of photos or other graphics you elect to post to any other publicly accessible area of the Service, you grant Yahoo! a world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish such Content on the Service solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted, or, in the case of photos or graphics, solely for the purpose for which such photo or graphic was submitted to the Service. This licence exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and shall be terminated at the time you delete such Content from the Service.

(c) With respect to all other Content you elect to post to other publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[gullevek]

yeah, but dumb, that you can tag all your pictures with the CC. And that overrules this one quite fast.

FUD all over again.

Re:Get a Picasa account

[nath_de]

On top of this, the paid account on Picasa only gives 6GB while Flickr gives unlimited storage.

The three changes

[gullevek]

1) Merge accounts
- only whines will care. The rest just merges and moves on

2) only 3000 contacts
- if you have so many, you are anyway like myspace and thats useless. Seriously, what meaning has it to have 3000 contacts if you don't do anything with it. How do you want to follow up on pictures or anything.

3) only 75 tags
- again, who needs so many tags. It is just no real limitation.

So overall it is just something people who love to whine, can whine about.

We have seen this *before* before!

[necro2607]

"Yahoo tried to pull this stunt almost two years ago, after it first acquired Flickr."

They also pulled the exact same "stunt" years ago when they acquired GeoCities in 1999.

Because I didn't "convert" a couple of my GeoCities accounts into new-fangled Yahoo accounts, the two very first websites I ever made, in 1995, are lost forever. Yahoo!

I'll give them on thing....

[CaTfiSh]

To their credit, Yahoo Mail has carried the old Rocketmail users throughout their many transitions. Not that it requires that much extra effort, but it's does factor into their efforts, having to carry my account for the last 10 years or so.....

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[lilburne]

No different from any other photo hosting site. b) You allow them display your pics on the web, to convert them to thumbnails to so dispaly them easier, to sharpen said thumbnails so that they don't look like crap.

Re: Hell NO to Picasa (NGQ ~ not quite right)

[goon]

> Now check this out from Yahoo:

NQR. Check this post where wii.yahoo.com had to pull images from flickr where they ignored the licensing ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/378171483/

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[E IS mC(Square)]

Thanks for that. Yes, I do use CC and will continue to. But then, isn't there a conflict? You 'agreed' to grant them 'rights' to use your images, but the CC you opt for may prevent them.

And no, FUD was not my intent. I was merely replying to somebody's objection over Google's T&C by just pointing out that Yahoo has even more of it.

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[gullevek]

In my opinion, the CC overrules this, and I do hope that I am not wrong. I do not want my pictures to be used for any commercial use.

But the only way to prevent this, is actually not uploading them.

Re: Hell NO to Picasa (NGQ ~ not quite right)

[E IS mC(Square)]

Very convenient! I was not aware of this.

But if I get it right, all they did was just to show thumbnails of pics tagged with 'wii' from Flickr, actual link still points to flickr. I guess this is not different from a lot of other websites and blogs doing the same using Flickr APIs. Not sure if Yahoo was in the wrong here.

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[UbuntuDupe]

Off topic: Love your name. That was a Star Trek card I really like some 10+ years ago :-)

Yahoo wrong, but corrected

[goon]

> Not sure if Yahoo was in the wrong here

Yes, because the images they extracted from the wii flickr feed was not filtered for images tagged with CC licenses restricting commercial use. It's been corrected without fuss but is stirring up the natives a bit

Re:Hell NO to Picasa

[gullevek]

Woho! You are the first person that recognises it :)