All this over a login…
Does anyone care what I think about the great Flickr / Yahoo login controversy? Not to mention to utterly asinine Wii thumbnail complaint? I dunno but what the hell. Some points.
Yahoo is an evil corporation. Has been for years. This is not news. That said, I think it’s slighty less evil in places than it was, say, five years ago. That’s still evil, of course, but these things are relative, and subjective. Whatever, it’s a big company that only really cares about money.
Flickr was bought by Yahoo nearly two years ago. At that point, regardless of any firewalls or promises about leaving it alone, it became “A Yahoo Company”. This is beyond dispute. Putting it bluntly, if you had a problem with Yahoo in 2005 why are you still using Flickr today?
One of the ways Yahoo makes money is though “data mining”, building up profiles of users to, amongst other things, direct adverts at them. Oddly, this is what most massive internet companies do. Google stores your search queries. Christ alone knows what News International would do if it had a clue about the internet. Again, this is not news.
Things like Yahoo’s Web Beacons (which track you around certain sites on the web) have been around since 2002. They’re kidna icky but they’re not news. And I’m sure they’re not unique to Yahoo. Also, they have nothing to do with having a Yahoo account. If you’ve been to any site in the program you’ll have gotten one regardless of your login. I wouldn’t be surprised if Flickr is included in this.
If Yahoo hadn’t bought Flickr somebody else would have and they’d have to be as large as Yahoo in order to provide the sort of storage, database and bandwidth support necessary to run a photo site. People seem to have short memories about just how flakey and slow Flickr was prior to the buyout. It couldn’t have survived as a nice independent site for much longer. If they hadn’t gone to bed with the corporates there would be no Flickr today.
That said, Flickr is just a website. For me it’s a very useful website that has led to good things. In fact it led to my current blogging job in a roundabout way. I owe Flickr a lot, not just for making me a better photographer and introducing me to new people. Given that, I’m prepared to sacrifice some moral qualms (which I wrote about last summer) for something that works for me. I have a number of books published by HarperCollins but that doesn’t affect my stance on Rupert Murdoch.
What bugs me most of all is the righteous indignation of “old skool” Flickr users who are using this, quite reasonable, requirement to move over to a centralised login system, after 18 months notice, to kick up an almighty stink. If they’re such passionate Flickr users from the old days then they’ll have known about this for over a year, certainly before they renewed their Pro accounts. Crying foul now is just plain rude, and claiming it’s because Yahoo is an evil company shows an astounding ignorance about the last two years. Either deal with it like you deal with every other ethical compromise you have to make in your life or leave like you should have done in 2005.
Maybe I’m old and jaded but there’s no such thing as perfect, especially when you bring services into play. If you want to be free of all that shit then host your photos on your own site just like we did in the days before Flickr. Because that was so much better than using Flickr, wasn’t it?
God, I’ve gone on a bit more than I was intending. I hope you’ve been skimming.
In short, if you’re not happy with Yahoo owning Flickr, stop using Flickr. It’s only a fucking website.
I remember when the Old Skool was something to be proud now. Now it’s just embarrassing.
That’s my last word on the matter, you’ll be glad to hear.
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I don’t use flickr, mainly because this computer can’t talk to my camera and partly because it;s a drag having to wait for sites with tons of pictures which load automatically.
Anyway, your general point is good. I use Myspace quite a lot and of course it’s a load of festering commercial toss. But if Murdoch’s providing something useful and free, I don’t mind loads of stupid ads for products I will never buy (and a decent browser will block most of them anyway).
I’ve got about six free Flickr accounts, and no paid accounts, so I’ve got no personal complaint with Flickrhoo, but I agree with the people who feel put-out by the way they’ve been treated.
The key things to keep in mind are that
1. Flickr is more about social networks than photographs. There are basketloads of photo sites out there. Flickr sets itself apart through its social networking features.
2. Quality of customer service is a subjective thing largely based on the customer’s mindset. In other words, even if Flickr users were a vain, tetchy lot, then anything that gets their backs up should be a bona fide ‘problem’ to be addressed. If 5% of Flickr users are ‘proud’ of their old skool status, then they deserve to be taken seriously on that basis.
A significant group of people feel they’ve been treated in a shabby manner. Take them at their word. They don’t have to explain or justify themselves. It isn’t about the login per se. It’s about feeling valued as a customer, about a ’social’ investment in building up trust and relationships. Flickr and Yahoo are devaluing some people’s social capital.
I’ve decided, partly out of solidarity, that I’m going to let my accounts lapse. I don’t need any Flickr accounts, don’t use the Web 2.0 features, have a paid account at Zoto that meets my needs. So it’s not a pride or investment issue for me. I’m also a member of several Yahoo groups, so I’m not driven by pure hatred of Yahoo. But I do think Flickr and Yahoo are negligent towards their users in some ways. So I’m minimising my use of their services.
Hope that makes some sense of the ‘opposing’ perspective.
dp, if these people believe that quality of customer service is based on how they log in to the site, they’re truly deluding themselves. All this change is about is Yahoo! reducing their costs by harmonising their login structures and databases across their different sites. It makes it easier for users to - I didn’t have to sign up for a seperate flickr account, I just used the same id I use for the hull freecycle list on Yahoo! Groups Expect something similar to happen to upcoming.org in the future.
These guys should consider themselves lucky - flickr still exists as a different brand name. A few years ago, it would’ve been changed into ‘Yahoo! Photos’, just like eGroups.com became (decades ago in internet time) Yahoo! Groups. A vocal minority made the same kind of protest back then, but yahoo doesn’t really care - the integration opens the service up to more users than they’ll lose.
Hi Smigs. It looks like I should reiterate: it’s not about the login per se. Sure, lots of people are complaining about the login, and about the wii thing, and about monetisation, and about Yahoo giving personal details to the Chinese government, but most of those are relatively superficial things in and of themselves. They are more important as symbols of a breakdown in trust. A small but vocal group of users feels violated. There’s nothing logical about it. It just is.
Yay, Flickr now has easy Yahoo log in :) I just created my account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mockneyrebel/
dp:
1) That’s why you need to make an ethical decision one way or the other. True, there ain’t anything like Flickr out there when it comes to community. I doubt I would have gotten what I’ve got though blogging my photos or joining something like DeviantArt. So, for me, it’s worth the trade off.
2) While not on the scale of, say, YouTube, Flickr is now a very broad church. The original members are a minority and those that are kicking up a fuss are, I’d imagine, way less than the 5% who hadn’t gotten around to switching. I’d say they’ve been dealt with very well. They’ve been given two years to decide whether they want to stay (during which time the moaners have renewed their Pro accounts) and are now being offered a refund, not to mention tying up the time and energies of the Flickr team for days. For a multinational corporation this is astoundingly good customer service given to a tiny proportion of their customers. Also I haven’t seen anyone bitching about this in the communities I’m involved with, just on that thread.
“a breakdown in trust” which, you’ll note, occured in 2005 when they announced this was going to happen. And it wasn’t a quiet burried announcement - there was a hell of a stink kicked up. To cry foul now is…
My patience has run out with these people. They can fuck off now.
They’ve been offered refunds? If I were a paying member I’d be pretty happy with that. But it seems that some of the old skool want more. I saw a variety of comments along the lines of ‘we made Flickr what it was’ with their investment, their social capital. They are mounting the equivalent of a shareholders revolt. Small, but loud, and remarkably unified.
As for customer service, you’ve got a point. If Yahoo had simply absorbed the old Flickr like Smigs says about eGroups, none of this would be happening. So it seems that Flickr has been a victim of paying too much attention to its users. How ironic.