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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."
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?
I don't respond to AC's.
How does "require a different sign on method" equate to "abandon"?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
" 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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
/. post?
... ? ... Anyone else see a possible problem in his motivation for saying something like this?
I'm sorry, was this supposed to reinforce the "OMG YAHOO IS EVIL" slant of this
So a guy who's competing with Yahoo says Yahoo sucks?
Latewire
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".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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)
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
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?
Was there any difference in my Flickr experience after the switch? No.
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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.