Tech & Biz

Flickr: Viva La Revolucion

by clorenz1 | February 1, 2007 at 05:03 pm

1114 views | 2 Recommendations | 1 comment

I always enjoy reading Suw Charman's blog, and today she has a really great piece on the battle brewing inside Flickr between long time members and the new Yahoo higher-ups.

I can remember when the announcement came that Yahoo was buying Flickr, that day I said to myself things will never be the same on one of my favorite sites. And then shortly after the announcement I thought I had no other option but to merge my account into yahoo's (a company I would rather not have to deal with at all). Of course I have come to realize that I could have avoided this step, but it was hard to identify when signing in since it was everywhere, and appeared to not allow you to pass without taking the step. So now I have a Yahoo account that I will never use, and I felt really crappy that I was forced into doing something I did not want to do. It really made me mad! As a long time user I never made an agreement with Yahoo when I signed up, because I would never have signed up to a Yahoo site, but the damage is done, and we will see how others do in their fight to stop the Flickr/Yahoo forced sign-in merger! Viva la revolucion!!!!

Hey! Unhip square kid with no friends!

You may not have noticed, but we've been making it increasingly difficult for you to sign in to Flickr using your original Flickr ID by burying the sign-in page deep in the bowels of our site, where we hoped you'd never find it. It seems, however, that you haven't taken the hint, and are still using your old ID. For shame. From March 15th you're not going to be able to use your old ID anymore, and we're going to force you to either sign up to Yahoo or use your Yahoo ID instead. We don't really care if this is an inconvenience for you - you're just going to have to lump it.

We're making this change now because it makes life much easier for us. We also want to introduce you to a plethora of Yahoo services that you've never shown the least bit of interest in, and probably neither want nor need. We've already introduced some new features to Flickr and we made them Yahoo-only, so that we can pretend that we're doing you a favour by forcing you to use your Yahoo login. Just to prove it, here are two things that you can't currently do. Fool.

It appears that Flickr is making changes to “improve” its service. Now, before I continue, I must admit that none of these changes currently affect me, so I’m looking at this and saying, “Whatever,” but these changes have clearly affected some people, and so for them, I make this post.

The changes in question are as follows:

Moving members to a parent company is an often-used tactic--one that was surprisingly delayed by Yahoo two years since the acquisition of Flickr (how do you think MySpace grew so fast?). It obviously gives an immediate increase in the number of Yahoo members, and integrates the two applications more closely; something Yahoo insisted they would not do despite their purchase of Flickr in 2005.

Yet when it comes to marketing, perhaps Yahoo is not making the wise decision by forcing Flickr users to surrender their Flickr account names and take on one from Yahoo. Instead of encouraging members to use more Yahoo features, they may alienate a large group of people.