flickr, thanks to one sociopath-seeming member, has declared war on me. so… what else can a guy do but fight back?

http://members.nowpublic.com/dysamoria

What a bizarre situation.

Me too, and I have been very happy with the decision. Not only do I avoid dealing with scumbags Yahoo (see http://www.booyahoo.blogspot.com/), but I much prefer Simpy’s interface and features.

It’s what nay-sayers like Nick Carr (and me) have been saying all along: Web 2.0 is all about the sharecropping. The chat and the creativity and the pooling of talent are real enough, but so is the eagerness of big business to make money out of it. (And I don’t see a great deal to choose between Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and News International in that respect.)

I dumped del.icio.us in favour of Simpy some time ago. Has anyone reverse-engineered Flickr yet?

1) Yes, there are some changes which, under the hood, are binary. Either you are on the old system or the new system. But there are ways in which you can give the impression that the change is gradual, and not spring big surprises on people. Flickr could have emailed us all six or even 12 months ago, and said “In order to build X, Y and Z new tools, we need to have everyone on the Yahoo! infrastructure. The reasons for this are A, B, C. There will come a point where we have to switch everyone, but we’re giving you lots of advanced notice.” They then could have continued to update us on the new services and encouraged (not nagged, or bullied, but encouraged) us to switch. Then when you get to that point where you have to flick a switch, it doesn’t come as so much of a surprise.

It also gives people an opportunity not to renew their Pro account if they don’t want to, or to switch to another service. It’s essential that you give people the opportunity to take their photos and go somewhere else, but if you’ve just renewed your Pro account, you’re going to be pissed off that you didn’t know about this earlier, so that perhaps you could make a different decision.

You’re right that the log-in issues doesn’t change the fact that Yahoo! have owned Flickr for 18 months, but what is different is that I’ve been able to ignore that, and suddenly I get my nose rubbed in it. I didn’t like that - didn’t like their tone or their attitude.

2) I don’t remember Flickr explaining their reasons to me. And they haven’t managed to put into concrete terms the benefits to me of their decision to force me to switch. Again, doesn’t mean that these reasons and benefits don’t exist, it just means they haven’t managed to communicate them to me very well. And if you don’t communicate your reasons very well, then they may as well not exist.

3) Yahoo!’s Wii page is not a community page, it’s a branding page, and they’ve said as much. And the big issue here is not what other people do with CC’d photos, or the value judgements that some people feel need to be made around reuse. That’s irrelevant. The issue is that Yahoo! was using All Rights Reserved and Non-Commercial images on a commercial site - a clear breach of licences, and an indication that Yahoo! really don’t get Flickr, and that they see Flickr as resource to be exploited, not a community of people to be respected.

I don’t mind about people not caring about the Yahoo! login thing - I’m happy for people to be happy with the switch-over. I’m not going to demand that anyone get up in arms about this if they don’t feel like it. In fact, I’m less pissed off about the actual switch, and more pissed off with the way that they are handling it. Their email was a piece of patronising crap, and they’ve failed to really assuage people’s worries on their forums.

I always expect Yahoo! to be shit… so no surprise or disappointment there, just business as usual. But I did expect Flickr to communicate with their users better.

This is a great wrap up of the current issues, but I do have to point out three flaws:

1) A login process is an either-or proposition; you either tie your account together, or you don’t. There is not much more Flickr could have do to make the process gradual tha what they did… which is to emphasis the Yahoo login method more and more, wait for more of the community to become Yahoo log-in-ers, and when it become too much to support and the percentages were right, rip the rest of the bandaid off and switch. The login process doesn’t change the underlying fact that YAHOO has owned all the data, hosted all the photos, and been the person to sue, for the past 18 months.

2) Just because some people don’t listen to, or believe, Flickr’s reasons that we, the Flickr users, will benefit form one login, doesn’t mean Flickr staff haven’t explained it over and over. In a nutshell: having to support only one login system will free up development time, support staff time, design time, and will streamline future tool development for them and thus will allow them to give us more nifty features. (Or, I suppose, layoff staff and save money, but that seems unlikely.) You have worked on Web sites, so you clearly understand that redundant work is something that’s bad for everyone: the staff, the client, the site visitors. Flickr is trying to avoid this, and the benefits will be coming to us all.

3) Yahoo is creating the Wii pages as a community feature. Yes, they’re trying to make money. Yes, they are on the grey side of a line that goes form black to white. But people who post Flickr photos with commercially restricted terms on sites with Amazon links, with Google ads, with tip jars… People who run hobby sites and use Flickr images and have advertising to pay for bandwidth and hosting… Non-profits who use Flickr photos but to advocate viewpoints contrary to the images creators… Basically, there are lots of value judgements with shades of meaning that the CC license doesn’t fully explain, neither for the copyright holder nor for the image user. I think Yahoo screwed up, but I’m much more inclined to think that it’s a low-level screw up, not a high level policy error. (The Wii package person can’t even do basic math: http://wii.yahoo.com/buyers-guide has addiiton errors on two out of three sub-pages at the time of this writing.)

The reason that you’re hearing so fociferously from people yelling about Flickr, is that people like me simply don’t care about switching to a Yahoo login. I’m as Old Skool as they come (was at the Flickr Vancouver going-away party, got the T-shirt!) and really, really it doesn’t matter to me. And so I haven’t joined in and argued the opposing side, because it just didn’t matter to me. But seeing how you went through all the trouble to explain why people were upset, I thought I ought to explain why I wasn’t.

It beggars belief that while Yahoo is moving onto this whole new Brand Universe/Portal concept of theirs - they’re totally ignorant and blind to just how damaged a brand they are are themselves.