Flickr To Abandon Early Adopters 254
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."
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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, rat
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It's a drag. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's a drag. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Let me count the ways. (Score:3, Insightful)
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-g
Re:Let me count the ways. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [flickr.com].
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 [metlin.org].
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 catego
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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 cate
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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.
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Maybe its just me but I've already got a yahoo account so I didn't give a shit when Y
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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.
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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...)
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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
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty inflammatory title for a Slashdot article. I got confused when looking at my RSS feeds and thought I was seeing Digg's.
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I worked in retail for a long time and one thing I
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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 th
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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 s
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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
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [flickr.com]
S0? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 Yaho
Re:Zoomr? (Score:4, Funny)
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'.
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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 th
Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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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...."
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Everyone else saw it. They were trying to make that point. Glad you caught it.
An anonymous READER? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [b3ta.com]".
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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 payin
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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 quit
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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.
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Conflict of Interest? (Score:4, Funny)
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Eh, "Regent of Macedonia"... isn't the kid [wikipedia.org] 16?
Your ageism is as unwelcome as sexism or racism. Correct yourself.
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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.
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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.
Point the first: s/peolpe/people/, s/puperty/puberty/
P
Prominent user, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe... (Score:2)
I don't know this guy or his scruples, but that *could* be a reasonable scenario (or he's just a jerk).
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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...
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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.
I'm out (Score:2, Redundant)
Storm in a tea cup (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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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.
"Many users are calling this BS (Score:2)
> "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
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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,
Direct competitor to Flickr ? (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Same thing happened (Score:2)
If I didn't game so much I might ha
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yahoo login works fine - no downside (Score:5, Informative)
SmugMug (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.smugmug.org/ [smugmug.org]
Granted, they don't have the kind of communities that Flickr does, but I find them more than sufficient for my photos...
Awe-inspiring (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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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.
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Alternatives? (Score:2, Informative)
I am [flickr.com] 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 [flickr.com] of reasons [flickr.com].
The problem is finding something else.
I've looked at Zooomr [zooomr.com]. 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 ques
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Tour of Photagious [photagious.com]
A slideshow I made [photagious.com]
My photos on Photagious [photagious.com]
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I'm sure you do, seeing that you're the CTO [photagious.com] of the site.
Is it so hard to add a disclaimer?
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flickr letter translated (Score:2)
I thought this was a good translation of the yahoo
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/01/31/ya
Not all of us are weeners (Score:5, Informative)
Was there any difference in my Flickr experience after the switch? No.
Two things (Score:2)
But I wanted to say something for a long time - I get spam because of del.icio.us
I think it's important to note... (Score:2)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
cross marketing (Score:2)
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
Why is it so hard to understand? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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 mountain
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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!
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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.
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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