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?

[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?

[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?

[crlove]

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

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

Re:So?

[winkydink]

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

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

Re:So?

[winkydink]

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

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?

Question

[LMacG]

How does "require a different sign on method" equate 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/

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?

[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'.

Conflict of Interest

[slughead]

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

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

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

An anonymous READER?

[drinkypoo]

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

[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.

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)

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.

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.

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.