A Blog About Making Culture
I am okay with my Yahoo sign-in.
January 31, 2007
I've seen a lot of weird, very belated, hand-wringing about Flickr requiring early adopter users to sign in with their Yahoo accounts. This is prompted, I understand, by those users having gotten an email letting them know about the required change.
Now, I was a very early Flickr user, and as soon as they got acquired by Yahoo and we were all told we'd have to migrate, I did so. I am pretty sure that at least 99% of early Flickr users already have a Yahoo login somewhere. So clearly, an unwillingness to have a Yahoo account is probably not the cause of any recalcitrance.
I have seen one well-articulated objection: There are few user benefits that result from the migration. But, now that Flickr Mobile works with Yahoo logins, there aren't any features lost when making the transition. One could argue the message about the transition could have been written differently, but that's surely splitting hairs, isn't it?
It's been more than a year since this change was announced, with a firm timetable set and well-communicated. It's a tiny (though admittedly vocal and valuable) minority of users who are affected. And this is not, to quote some of the inaccurate adjectives being thrown around "sudden" or a "surprise". Any information that users are afraid of Yahoo having is clearly already available to the company, since the servers are all hosted in the same place and connected together -- this is just a formality. Frankly, I watch online communities a lot and am only rarely baffled by the vagaries of mob justice. But this one has me stumped.
One other note, I have generally positive feelings about all the various photo sharing sites out there -- the ability to build community online through shared experiences is a powerful thing. But I can not and will not ever concede that using these sorts of opportunities to promote a competing business is cool. And I take some consolation in the fact that, as upset as people get, almost all of the threats to take one's ball photos and go home end up being mostly empty threats, designed to express some weird emotional desire that I really wish I could understand.
Previously: South Korea's Infertile SEED
Next: A Blogger Summit
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
Flickr Competitors Flock Like Vultures: read more »Anil Dash
This one's for Yosemite Sam: This one's sublime: "What's your favorite kitchen sound?" This one's the truth, finally. The most eloquent dismissal of User Generated Discontent (or in this case, nominal competitor-generated discontent) yet written: It does, however, drive me nuts th... read more »Rob Drimmie
I said it on Andre’s page and I’m saying it here: Stumped? Really?
People don’t like change. People get comfortable with the way things are and when they feel they don’t have any influence over something that impacts the way they go about their lives — however trivial — it is an irritant.
There is no place where it is easier to complain about an irritant than the Internet, so when an Internet service makes a change — however trivial — they are going to be flooded with bitching and moaning.
The thing that is most confusing to me about the complaints is that I don’t understand why this apparently has you stumped. When 6A changed MT’s licensing, there was a freaking uproar. When 6A bought LiveJournal, there was a freaking uproar. They were changes of a different scale, but I’ll bet when you changed your blog layout there was a freaking uproar, or maybe just some people saying “damn man, that’s a bright purple”. The uproar scales a bit also.
pb
I know it’s hard to understand since this is such an innocuous change (from the company’s perspective), but brand allegiance is tied up with people’s identities these days. (I’m a Mac person not a PC person. Or I’m a Nike person not an Adidas person.) And we wear these brands on ourselves to identify other members of our tribe. These original users are Flickr people not Yahoo! people. I really think it’s as simple (and complex) as that.
Anil
Mmmm… PB’s explanation resonates with me. I think Andrew Zolli said “Brands are Culture”, and this seems in line with that. “You’re not allowed to change how I see myself, even if it’s to more accurately reflect who I am.”
Rob, I am not so sure this is about people simply objecting to change. If it were, we’d have had this story with Blogger’s integration of Google sign-in. (That user base, after all, is still far larger than Flickr’s, and they all, well… have blogs.)
What I am stumped by is the capriciousness of these outbursts. If I feel that Flickr’s copy writing is a bit too precious, why would I take the occasion of a login change email to make note of it? Similarly, when Yahoo Photos (which stores similar data, and has far more users, and is run by the same company) changed their entire UI to a radically new look, why didn’t those users engender a BBC-worthy fuss?
I guess what I’m driving at isn’t simply what makes people get upset about change, but rather, what makes one change a simple fuss, and another an all-out blogosphere panic party?
Ramanan
People love their drama, and this is really just an excuse for that. This shouldn’t be a surprise or a shock: they’ve been asking you to switch for well over a year now. The Internet is a good venue for people to get a bit more over the top.
I’m not surprised Thomas Hawk decided to comment on all this since he’s a bit of jerk. (The fact that Zoomr was down earlier today isn’t helping his cause. It looks to be back up now.) I recall the backlash to his comments when he was initially launching zoomr.
Thomas Hawk
Anil, I have spent far more time inside of Flickr than you have. I have spent thousands of hours living inside and being a part of that community, both before I began working with and after I began work with Zooomr. I think your commentary of my dissatisfaction as motivated by a competing business is disingenuous at best.
I’ve maintained a Flickr fan blog. I’ve been quoted in the mainstream press about Flickr. I’ve been included in a book about Flickr.
Believe it or not I actually love Flickr — a great deal. I think it is one of the best things that I’ve ever found in my life. And not all of what I write about the company is negative. I wrote the first review on Zooomr’s geotagging praising their service under the headline, “Flickr’s New Geotagging, Pretty Damn Impressive.” In fact, my most trafficked post this month was one I wrote last week about the top 10 flickr hacks where I praised Flickr for their Open API. It was on digg and over a hundred other blogs linked to it.
So the fact that you’d expect me to sit still and just take it when I’ve just been told I’m going to need to dump over 40% of my contacts on Flickr simply because I work for Zooomr, well, that just is not going to happen.
I’d be just as upset about this if I wasn’t affiliated with Zooomr. I don’t want to merge my accounts. This will make multiple account log ons more difficult but more significantly I don’t want to dump 40% of my contacts (almost all who have been made by my reciprocating with other users). If I had spent thousands of hours on Vox using the site, interacting with others and then you told me that I needed to drop 40% of my contacts I’d be pissed too.
in the past including a story last week about the ten best hacks for flickr that praised flickr for their open API and talked about all the cool ways you can use flickr. I use flickr every single day and have spent thousands of hours on the site both before and after joining Zooomr. I’ve been quoted in the mainstream press about Flickr, included in a book about Flickr, etc., etc.
Even though I work for a competitor, I still love and use Flickr every single day. I’ve faved over 18,000 photos on the site. I’ve posted over 7,000 photos on the site. I continue to use it and love it but simply because I happen to work for a competitor doesn’t preclude me from expressing my dissatisfaction over this move.
I have spent far more time as a member of the Flickr Community than you have. This is a stupid anti community boneheaded move on Flickr’s part that didn’t need to happen. And it’s not just my voice that is ringing out today, it’s hundreds of other users.
Thomas Hawk
By the way Anil, it’s interesting that you would try to call me out on this. I’m an actual active contributing member of the Flickr Community.
SmugMug is offering a 50% discount to their service today to dissatisfied Flickr users, under the headline of “The Dark Side of the Flickr Acquisition”. I suppose that would violate your sense of what is wrong and right in the world as well.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2007/01/31/the-dark-side-of-the-flickr-acquisition/
I tell you what. You drop 40% of your contacts on Flickr and see how it feels.
pb
I think it’s a matter of how closely people tie their identities with the brand. People didn’t think of themselves as “Yahoo! Photos” people. For many of them (I’m guessing) the application was a “default” not a conscious choice. It wasn’t a part of who they were. Flickr became more than a photo-sharing service to the early users—it was a part of their identity. (Partly because photos themselves are such personal reflections of who we are and how we see the world.) And now Yahoo! is asking these users to re-think that piece of their identity. I think calling it a “panic party” is discounting the emotional connection that people have with each other via software.
gn
PB almost got it right. It’s not just that Flickr and Yahoo are different brands. It’s that Flickr was a cool alternative brand, and Yahoo is a mainstream and boring one. Imagine if CBGB was purchased by the Hard Rock Cafe. Would punkers willingly don Hard Rock attire?
Rob Drimmie
Anil, that’s a good point about the Blogger/Google comparison, and probably lends weight to pb’s brand association suggestion (which I certainly agree with, it is the crux of my comment at torrez’s site).
Anil
I have spent far more time as a member of the Flickr Community than you have.
I think what you mean is that you’ve spent more time participating in Flickr Communities. I’ve been a member of the site for longer, but this is sort of an irrelevant measure anyway. I wasn’t questioning your commitment to Flickr or lack thereof, not least because of your extensive list of credentials above. But rather, I look askance at your motivations for helping to promote an essentially minor change into something far more insidious-seeming. And yes, I’d say Don is doing the same thing, and that it’s not particularly classy of him, either. — That’s nothing personal against either of you; I think it just reflects some hard-won experience on my part that all of us who participate in web communities end up on the wrong end of the flaming torches at some point and that it’s not only kind but wise to be judicious in taking advantage of it.
I do agree limiting social networks is suboptimal; I don’t really have an opinion on it other than that. I suspect you, Thomas, and perhaps a few dozen other people are affected by this limitation, and I’d be surprised if the Flickr team doesn’t do something to address the concern.
pb, you’re right that I’m being glib by calling it a “panic party” — I don’t mean it to be dismissive of people’s concerns, but just because these things happen so regularly. It’s especially odd because I bet most people don’t identify as “Flickr people”, until they’re presented with not being “Flickr people” any longer. And why didn’t people who identified as “Blogger people” (myself included!) object more to becoming Googlers? Or any one of a dozen other examples….
leahpeah
i’ve resisted switching this past year, mostly because i’m lazy. but when i got the email the other day, i did it. i already had a yahoo login so it did literally take 10 seconds to merge them. and because i have nowhere near 5000 contacts and i doubt i ever will, the restrictions don’t bother me. in fact, i think i only know 2 people that it would effect. not that those two people aren’t as important as everyone else, but if you have to create an environment that can keep growing with new users, it makes sense to me to have some basic parameters in there. i guess it would be nice if things could stay the same and just like we like them, but the online world rarely does. it goes backwards and dies or moves forwards and grows.
James Bennett
I feel sorry for Flickr right now; they’re caught between a dead-end tech platform and a raving lynch mob that’ll scream for their blood if they try to change.
Though it is an instructive example of social dynamics to see how the lynch mob self-organizes at the slightest provocation, and how some people (e.g., Thomas above) can manage to so completely subsume their personal identity into a brand as to change their entire definition of themselves.
julian
The only reason I haven’t switched to using a Yahoo! ID is that I dislike having to login again every two weeks. I’m perfectly fine with my authentication being maintained by a cookie.
pb
“…why didn’t people who identified as ‘Blogger people’ (myself included!) object more to becoming Googlers?”
That’s a great question, and here I think it’s all about brands too. At the time Google was perceived as a “disruptive” brand, similar to the blogging world itself. Google hadn’t yet gone public, or gone to China. I’m sure the deal would go down much differently today. Yahoo!, like gn mentioned, has a carefully cultivated “mainstream” image and the punk rockers can’t see themselves in it.
Thomas Hawk
I do agree limiting social networks is suboptimal; I don’t really have an opinion on it other than that. I suspect you, Thomas, and perhaps a few dozen other people are affected by this limitation, and I’d be surprised if the Flickr team doesn’t do something to address the concern.
Anil, and when they do then maybe I won’t feel as passionately about this. You are off base though to judge my motivations. If I was merely interested in bashing Flickr I’d just do that. Since joining Zooomr I’ve written posts clearly complimenting Flickr on many things. Their API is great, as I wrote about their geotagging, it was “pretty damn impressive.”
But yes, it may not mean anything to you, but when I’ve spent thousands of hours adding contacts, viewing their photos, faving their photos, and participating as one of the most active users on Flickr, being told to dump 40% of my contacts sucks. In the Flickr FAQ (ironically still even now) there is a question that reads “Is there a limit to the number of my contacts,” the answer is “there used to be but not anymore.”
If I knew that Flickr was going to cap my contacts then I wasted time adding (it’s actually a pretty inefficient four page task to add someone) all the contacts that I did.
You can look askance at my motivations all you want. It still sucks that I have to dump 40% of my contacts and especially with no contact organization tools to do it. What’s worse is that in order to drop someone you have to go through a several page process. And who should I drop A-F? S-Z?
The flaming torch here is hot right now because people don’t want these changes. Flickr does not have to make these changes. They are bad. They can be reversed. Read the help threads on them and you will see that people are passionately opposed to all of this. Not just me because I happen to be being forced to dump 40% of my contacts.
When Flickr does dumb things, especially when they affect me personally, I’m not going to quiet up on it just because I happen to be working on Zooomr at the same time. Equally when they do good things I will be the first out to praise them (as mine was the first post praising their geotagging, the dugg story on the new feature at the time, etc. etc.).
James
Anil, I think maybe the “blogger people” didn’t mind becoming “Googlers” because either A) They already had a GMail account, and were therefore already “Googlers” or B) They think of Google as less of a (evil) coorporation, and more of an organization that looks out for their users and gives them the services they want for free (take a look at GMail’s POP3 service vs. Yahoo! Mail’s if you want to see what user’s want, they want good service for free). In comparison, when you charge for a great service (like POP3 access) when your competitor is offering it for free, you look greedy.
Scott Johnson
I switched to the Yahoo ID on Flickr right away. I didn’t have a problem with it then, and nothing has changed. The benefit to me is that I have one less login to keep track of. Thanks Yahoo!
Doug Karr
I don’t have any problem with the Yahoo! login requirement for sites like these. However, if banks, hospitals, companies etc. begin to utilize these shared authentication systems, I’m out! A single login point can be really convenient, but it can also be a frustrating single point of failure.
Don MacAskill
I should note in my own defense that my blog post was truly inspired by Flickr customers emailing us (SmugMug) and asking us for a discount.
I’m definitely capitalizing on the situation, but for what it’s worth, it was our potential customers’ idea, not mine.
I think it’s only fair to note that I’ve often blogged about how much I like Flickr, and that remains true today. We actively send potential SmugMug customers to Flickr when they’re looking for social networking and community more than photo display, since it’s not something we do.
Thomas, though, has an unbeatable track record of fanboyism for Flickr that’s difficult to argue with. I truly believe he’s upset as a Flickr customer about the changes. I think he has a great point about how strange it is that a social networking site would limit his ability to do social networking.
Finally, based on the feedback I’m getting from Flickr refugees, I think the killing blow (for them) wasn’t the details of the announcement, but the tone. Gone are the days of warm & friendly Caterina announcements. Instead, it’s cold and corporate.
The “news” had zero upside, but lots of downside. The least they could have done is add a little human compassion to it.
Don
charles
Yahoo makes it a pain in the ass if you forget your password. Please just mail me a new password at my alt email address, or give me this option. I’m not the type of person who puts in real birthdates or secret questions (i’ve seen yahoo accounts hacked just by using this method many times) so once I forget it I’m screwed. Being that I only use Yahoo when I must I tend to forget it, or just my username since nothing reasonable is available. Then don’t bother trying to contact support since they don’t bother to answer with a human.
So yeah, I finally have a reason to remember my yahoo user/pass. Thanks flickr, I guess.
mare
I just spent more then 20 minutes to merge my flicker account with my yahoo ID. Why, because I have this Yahoo Id already more than 10 years and keep forgetting the password. Yahoo’s password recovery requires so many input (like birth-date, I have no idea I was honest, I usually just enter something, since this data is used for marketing) that it is nearly useless. But I don’t want to sign up again since then my ID will be even more difficult to remember (mare1678152378512@yahoo.ca or something). Fortunately I scoured my email folder and found my ID and password.
I had my own name as my Flickr username and I’ll surely miss it. I guess I have to go back using Fotolog :-)
Elliott C. Bäck
The problem is one of simple practicality. My Firefox knows how to log in right now. If I have to change to my Yahoo ID, it won’t know.
Nick Sweeney
My suspicion: most people who are old-school Flickr users already had a Yahoo login. (I certainly do, dating from back in the day.) But your Yahoo login is a bit like the Hotmail address that you still have, for some strange reason, or like the bottle of odd booze that you brought back from a foreign holiday and can’t bear to throw away. It’s a very, very peripheral part of one’s digital identity; it’s commodity email; it’s an annoying hoop-leap for certain things you can’t manage any other way.
(There’s the small matter that Yahoo Mail managed to delete the entirety of my admittedly small archive, beyond retrieval. Twice. In the last month. In short, I associate my Yahoo login with fuckwittage.)
What I want, I suppose, is to merge my Flickr ID with my Yahoo login and never, ever have to think about it again. But that won’t happen, will it? I assume I’ll get the daily reconfirm-your-password routine and all of the other UI annoyances that come with the Yahoo ID, even if they’re not waiting for me.
Andrew Dupont
I think the “mainstreaming” theories are the closest to the mark.
I was quite active on LiveJournal back in the day, and even before the Six Apart acquisition, people were very fearful of change, worried that this great community with more-than-fair pricing and a total lack of evil would fall to the dark side. So every announcement that could possibly be construed as a step toward “selling out” sent a certain faction of users into a total shit-fit.
I’ve read page after page of OUTRAGED USERS (RARRRRRGH!) with the same disbelief as you, Anil. But I think it’s got something to do with people clinging desperately to something they really like, worried that it’ll become part of the Internet “mainstream” with all of its negative connotations.
Of course, a small percentage of these people are actually just ungrateful bastards.
Paul D
Isn’t the registration progress for Yahoo some three-page monstrosity? I’m not looking forward to that.
And as far as Flickr being a cool brand and Yahoo being lame and boring, that’s true. What matters more to me, though, is that Flickr was always a user-empowering brand, and Yahoo is the company that helps foreign governments jail political dissidents. I let my pro account lapse into a regular one because I can’t stand the thought of giving Yahoo a buck.
SPD
Many issues have been raised by concerned Flickr users, nearly all of them valid, and almost none of them are addressed here or by the Flickr or Yahoo staff. This blog entry and some of the comments above fail to comprehend, for example, that many of us are concerned about Yahoo’s willingness to track our web navigation history and pass on our private information to marketers, as well as to government agencies (without a warrant or subpoena). They openly testified to this before Congress. And it is well known that this led to the jailing of Chinese dissidents. This aggressive stance toward its users was simply confirmed, along with many Flickr users’ concerns regarding copyright, when we discovered tonight that Yahoo was using our copyrighted images on a commercial page without our permission. This appears to have been no accident, as it is part of their new “brand universe” plan. This isn’t a matter of wanting to be frivolously trendy or cutting-edge, as so many are willing to imply in dismissing us, it’s a matter of ethics. And for many people, it’s a matter of protecting their livelihood.
TanNg
I’m OK too. The account merge takes nothing from me and it make Yahoo better, so I don’t have any reason for reject this. I’ve got many free services from Yahoo, now it’s time to give back.
Thomas Hawk
Ok, I’ve crafted my new form letter to send to people who make me a contact (several a day, and oftentimes new people to flickr — it will be a nice welcome for them).
Dear xxxxx xxxxx.
Thank you for adding me as a Flickr contact. Regrettably, while you may be checking out my photos from time to time, I will not be checking out yours. I’d like to be checking out yours but Flickr will not allow me to add any more contacts to my account. Flickr believes that reciprocity is a bad thing, so don’t take it personally that I’m not adding you back as a contact. I would if I could, and really thanks for checking out my stuff.
If you want to see more on Flickr’s boneheaded decision decision not to let me add you you can read up on it here:
flickr.com/forums/help/32686/
Also as I really would like to check out your work, feel free to sign up for a Zooomr account.
www.myopenid.com/zooomr
If you do this let me know your Zooomr url so that I can add you as a contact there and that way keep up with your work.
Sorry about all the trouble with this.
Love,
Tom
I’m going to send this letter to anyone who makes me a contact going forward until Flickr reverses their asinine decision to not allow me to add any more contacts.
John Anthony Evans
Personally I think there are several things at play.
First what PB said right at the top about brand is spot on.
Second and related to that is that the people we are talking about i.e. the early flickr users, just like the people commenting here are exactly the type of people to actually have opinions and care about such things. I know when Flickr was purchased by Yahoo I considered leaving just because it was Yahoo and I neither like nor trust Yahoo. Skype is the same; the moment I find a Skype alternative I am happy with but isn’t owned by Ebay I will be gone, and I am a good paying Skype customer and not just in it for the free calls.
I have been reading the commentary on Flickr and various blogs all the while thinking to myself; if Google had purchased Flickr – I so wish they did btw – then would such a change have annoyed people in the same way? Personally I would not have had the same feelings about a Google signin vs. a Yahoo! signin (stupid exclamation mark and all). For example Google things seem to work all the time whereas even Yahoos edit profile pages never seem to load for me. Essentially Yahoo and Flickr brands don’t have common ground in the context of the early Flickr users and even just the use of a Yahoo ID appears to tarnish Flickrs identity with these users. It also doesnt help that Flickr are using words like ‘kewl’ and ‘old skool’ in the email they sent out which simply made the ‘old skool’ users cringe and reminded them yet again about the change the brand has been going through and potentially where it is heading.
Lode
@Elliott C. Bäck : “The problem is one of simple practicality. My Firefox knows how to log in right now. If I have to change to my Yahoo ID, it won’t know.”
Login, Remember this info?, “Always”. This takes less time than posting this comment.
I have a Flickr Pro and a Zooomr pro account, but hardly use Zooomr, because it’s always dead slow to me, if it’s reachable at all. I don’t really get what the fuss is all about.
5000 contacts? Are this all people you know? Okay, maybe they should raise this limit (or abolish it completely), but this issue surely doesn’t affect everyone of the posters in this merge thread?
If you don’t want to give your data to the “soulless” Yahoo, know that they have it already (since they’ve owned Flickr for about 1,5 year now), and that you can always enter fake contact info. I also don’t use my Yahoo! mail address, but that doesn’t affect how I use Flickr at all. If you think Google is more of a cooperation than a corporation, you’re quite frankly just being naive.
Lastly, Don: Comic Sans? Seriously? Good luck getting the “design folk” on board..
Damian Cugley
I am sad to lose my old Flickr login because I preferred pdc, which is short, to damiancugley, which is long. One of the reasons I bother to register with new services at all is that I want to acquire the short name rather than the longer (but nigh-guaranteed to be unique) one.
Why couldn’t they just use OpenID? :-P
Chuck Olsen
I’ve been on Flickr since 2004 and often proclaim it’s my favorite web site, and “Flickring” is my favorite activity.
Changing to my Yahoo login has had zero impact on me. I’ll carry on being a big Flickr fan because my experience is exactly the same. I dno’t have any silly hangups about Yahoo being the parent company - with all due respect.
However, I’d be pissed if I had to chop thunsands of contacts. That’s ridiculous. Flickr - leave the existing members be! New users, or existing users under the limit — fine, implement the limit. You save face and don’t piss off some vocal, devoted users of your service.
David McDonald
Yes, what Flickr are doing will affect some people. Some people will lose a percentage of their contacts, boohoo.
On the scale of life changing, earth shattering events, this rates about a zero point 5. It doesn’t really compare to what else is happening in the world today. DO these people have lives outside the internet?
Adam
As Thomas has articulated pretty well, my impression of the firestorm is that the user revolt probably has as much to do about the new limits placed on the service as opposed to the forced Yahoo migration. The Flickr forums that were opened to discuss the subject probably have more complaints from users upset about the new “3000 Contacts” limit than they do about Yahoo.
I’m an old skool user who migrated as soon as given the chance so I don’t really care about the Yahoo migration. (And really, every old skool member has been reminded dozens of times that they eventually would be forced to migrate.) But there are some good arguments about why the new limits on contacts and tags are going to be hard on the community, especially for super-users like Thomas Hawk and Merkley???
ssp
I was annoyed by that login change as well. Sure, Yahoo may have had their hands on my information before and the actual setup of a new account only takes a few minutes. But why put me through the hassle if they know all that already?
Cool developers and web sites make an effort to integrate the existing accounts of sites they acquired with their own system such that people don’t notice. The lame just let the long-time account holders fight with yet another account to handle.
Perhaps it’s just the general spirit that feels wrong here. The fact that all of a sudden I am required to give all sorts of personal information just to get an account. Information that I may have exposed anyway on the site before - but voluntarily did so.
Perhaps it’s also the inconvenience of having yet another login name with yet another service to remember. And with Yahoo being an ancient service, this obviously is an ugly and long login name (which luckily the people at flicker where clever enough to hide anyway). In addition it seems that I now have a Yahoo Account and a Flickr which both map to different ‘real’ names for myself.
From a more practical point of view: Is there any way to just turn off the Mail account that you are seemingly forced to get when signing up? I don’t intend to log into Yahoo’s services and use them. I neither need nor want to have another Mail account.
Zach 
You’re ok with flickr forcing you to switch to using a yahoo id probably because you already have a yahoo id that you like using, those of us that don’t have yahoo id’s are going to lose our usernames and get stuck using some random name full of numbers instead of our nice flickr names.
Yahoo already has the ability to handle yahoo ids that aren’t @yahoo.com addresses as they do this for residential dsl customers. They could have easily made every flickr user name an @flickr.com yahoo id instead of forcing people to switch to yahoo id’s.
l.m.orchard
“those of us that don’t have yahoo id’s are going to lose our usernames and get stuck using some random name full of numbers instead of our nice flickr names.”
This seems to be one of the biggest misconceptions with the Flickr Yahoo ID migration.
Flickr has screen names, separate from login ids. When you tie a Flickr account to a Yahoo ID, your screen name (eg. magicalmike) does not necessarily have to be the same as your login id (eg. hackr12345foo). This confuses some people, though is a desirable security feature in some circles.
In other words: No, you will not be “stuck using some random name full of numbers instead of our nice flickr names”
Check yours:
http://flickr.com/account/prefs/screenname/
ramanan
Michael
As I ranted previously, the complainers are acting like a bunch of whiny children. There are big deals to complain about online, but this ain’t one of them.
And to Thomas Hawk, Anil won’t say this, but I will. You’re a freak. Go find a nice quiet corner of the internet and stay there quietly until you can play nice with the grown-ups.
I'd rather not say
I have been a Yahoo mail user since the day after Microsoft bought Hotmail and it stopped working correctly with Macs. (Sure, they fixed that in a few months, but I was gone by then, and good riddance. Look at the joke it has become!)
I have never used yahoo mail for anything I considered important, because I know Y! cannot be trusted. It’s the address I use as a filter, to see how much additional spam I get after signing up for a service. When I signed up for flickr originally, I used my yahoo email address, because I didn’t know that I could trust them. In the first month or so, they proved that they could be trusted, and the community I found there became something I enjoyed. So, within weeks, I transfered my account to my gmail address, and it remains there to this day. People on flickr know me in real life locally, and through countless messages and comments traded in online conversations with people literally across the globe. I don’t want the private feelings and ramblings and emotions of the community contacts I have had to be merged into the ilk that is yahoo.
Why? Well, first, Yahoo has no ability to control spam. Second, there are people datamining profiles and trading email addresses that were put on the web long before the current morass of privacy invasions were ever dreamed up. Why would I want those connections made? It’s like having been roommates with a very unsavory character in college and meeting all of his/her friends. After you graduate, start a family, get a respectable job, etc., what do you do when one of your old roommates’ friends come around trying to act all buddy-buddy? How do you explain those horrible people to your children, or to your boss, or even the receptionist? Why should I have to? Had I known my freshman year that I was rooming with the head of (insert your worst fear here), I would have joined the Peace Corps or the Army.
Forcing me to use my Yahoo ID is like making me move my family and friends into my college dorm room with my roommate and all those folks I couldn’t stand back then. I had no choice back then, because I didn’t know how to protect myself. Now, it is being forced on me by an outsider. And, as many, many have explained, there is no real good reason.
The number of Old Skoolers will only shrink. We will die, we will decide it’s not worth fighting for and knuckle under, or we will move to another service. Why push it?
Anil
Forcing me to use my Yahoo ID is like making me move my family and friends into my college dorm room with my roommate and all those folks I couldn’t stand back then.
Given that you’re still using the same Flickr name after you migrate, and your Flickr contacts don’t know what your Yahoo ID is, this is perhaps your second most specious argument. What’s the worst? “And, as many, many have explained, there is no real good reason.”
A good reason that you don’t like is not the same as “no real good reason”. Right now, having two login systems means the team has to work on maintaining both, when they could be doing things to add features or help build the community. Along with your contempt for the hundreds of millions of people who use Yahoo, this smacks of unadulterated elitism.
That’s perhaps the thing that bugs me the most about this situation. “I don’t want to be grouped in with people who aren’t early adopters” and “I don’t care if my personal preference imposes an innovation tax on the entire site” are incredibly anti-social motivations for anyone who belongs to a site that considers itself a community.
Whodat
umm … did it occur to anyone there may be Flickr users who use cryptic login names for Flickr but genuine logins on Yahoo and don’t post any pictures of themselves?
To use a Yahoo account, I would then have to create another dummy Yahoo account. Not good. Nope.
Anil
Whodat, what part of this don’t you understand?
Flickr has *screen names*, separate from *login ids*. When you tie a Flickr account to a Yahoo ID, your *screen name* (eg. magicalmike) does not necessarily have to be the same as your *login id* (eg. hackr12345foo).
whodat
ok ok - I understand it - I just didn’t see it
Anonymous
glass embeds macgregor sailboats tomoe yukishiro hlr5668w bolometer fatty coo mosquitoe salutary neglect canalboat vacation duac gel mulberry recipes ellensburg blue septic tank manufacturer unmatched brutality lobster bisque recipe marjolein gulinski birch carol and coyle twizzler deeann donovan cessna 206
Post a comment