Flickr have decided to downgrade their service. First downgrade won’t affect most of us, I don’t know many people who will be too upset with this one:
the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.
It’s the second that has me upset:
On March 15th, 2007 we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
I hate hate HATE Yahoo! logins. I don’t use Yahoo! services, any of them, despite my ISP being affiliated with them. My hope is that Flickr have a change of heart, or at least don’t further break their up to now excellent service with further backward “improvements” otherwise when my paid membership is used up I will be one of the many leaving. Restricting contacts etc, that just confirms their madness, but inflicting the sucky Yahoo! user account (and all that entails) just … annoys, irritates, blows.
It’s not the end of the world, certainly not the apocalypse you would think reading the forums, and believe me I feel for the Flickr dudes and dudettes who are taking the flak right now for this.
Thomas Hawk has done a great job rounding up the members reactions.
Flickr needs to reverse the asinine decisions made today to force people to merge their accounts with Yahoo and to place new limits on your contacts and tags.
6 Comments
At first I was pissed about the Yahoo! thing, but that was based on assuming that my Flickr account (“jeremey”) would become my Yahoo! ID … but that’s not so, the Yahoo! credentials are for login only. So I don’t really care, I made the switch.
As far as the contacts and tags… I couldn’t care less. If you have 3000 contacts, they’ve lost their utility.
I agree about Yahoo. My website was through Yahoo Small Business. One day, everything was fine. Next day, *poof* gone. I called Bombay, er, “Customer Service”, and the gal I spoke to hadn’t a clue as to what happened. I emailed YSB and basically said, “Fine. I’ll keep my money.” Deleted my Flickr account, too. Screw Yahoo.
I just reluctantly created a Yahoo account specifically for Flickr. I would much prefer to use my standard email address rather than have a Yahoo account, but such is life. I imagine that del.icio.us will be next to fall victim to this.
I have been thinking about using Flickr strictly for my more personal/amateur photos and using a different service for more professional photos maybe something like SmugMug.
I’m not a fan of yahoo!, but i don’t particularly have anything against them. I don’t over-tag my photos, I don’t have anywhere near 3000 contacts… and so, personally, i’m not against the merge.
Ever since Yahoo bought Flickr, I’ve been waiting for them to kill it. So far, they haven’t done anything I can’t deal with. I don’t have nearly 3000 contacts, and have never put more than a half dozen tags on a photo. I don’t like Yahoo login, either, but it’s stored in my browser, so it’s usually not a problem.
My real fear, though, is that it will just get worse. Yahoo does not have a history of improving things. It seems likely that each day we use Flickr, it will be worse than it was yesterday.
Yeah the Yahoo! login is a small irritation in the scheme of things, I just hope it’s not the start of many small irritations – death by a thousand paper cuts. One good thing about the Yahoo! meddling could be infrastructure to do truly cool things, like allow picture sales – my long dreamt about stock photo feature