Yahoo! Annoying Its Flickr Users

January 31st, 2007

Yahoo!One obvious, potential double-edged sword with the whole Web 2.0 user created content thing is that while it’s certainly handy to have passionate users that form a community, create content for you, and advertise your site through word of mouth, it can also work against you. Piss off the community (even over a matter that’s pretty minor) and you’re more succeptible to the effects, because it’s the foundation of the whole business model. This whole dust-up concerns having Flickr users switch to Yahoo! IDs, a decision likely made by Yahoo! that affects many Flickr users that could care less about peanut butter.

Note: The link above is written by Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, a flickr competitor.

It’s a safe bet that there are far more Yahoo! ID holders out there (potential flickr users) than original Flickr-folk, but it’s still surprising (to me, at least) to see the amount of ire, annoyance, and downright hate pointed in Yahoo!’s general direction. It’s not just Yahoo’s slow, Yahoo! pisses me off, Yahoo! bugs me, it’s the ultimate internet put-down: Yahoo! sucks. I had no idea.

The openness of the internet and the number of sites that have embraced forums and user created content means that a negative message can spread quickly with no hope of damage control (and I guess I’m tossing another twig onto the fire). And there’s no way to clamp down on it, for once users are used to open forums they certainly will look upon any limits as deservedly nothing less than censorship, further damaging a brand.

But I support all of this, as the end result will hopefully be beneficial, as corporations slowly realize they have to be honest, put the users first, and give us stuff we want instead selling us more crap we don’t, or they’ll get called on it. I hope Sony got that message last year. So I’m hoping this move ends up annoying Yahoo! more than it annoys the Flickr users. We’ll see.

Additional Reading: Mathew Ingram, Scott Karp

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Viewing 10 Comments

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    I would take what Thomas Hawk says with a grain of salt, since he has this silly Zooomr thing (which is such a horrible domain, IMO). He's looking to find problems with Flickr.

    As for the move to a Yahoo! ID, maybe it's because I'm a hardcore Flickr user, but I don't get it. Having a standard login makes sense, since Flickr content is being shared across other Yahoo! sites (like those microsites).
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    I do agree the reaction is more than a bit surprisingly negative over something that's ultimately rather minor. Good point about Thomas Hawk and Zooomr though. I also noted that SmugMug got in there too, but I decided not to link to them as it's anothe Flickr parallel (this stuff gets complicated).

    My point is more, whether the critisism is deserved or not, word spreads fast on the net these days ... and I'm glad for a good check and balance.
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    The other thing is the "squeeky wheel" syndrome. The most vocal users don't mean they're the majority. Take a look at Snap Preview -- I hate it but I don't know that I'm in the majority of people.

    There are a couple of perfectly valid reasons for the Flickr switch, one of which is to stop having to support a small anomaly in the user base (the other of course is to get people using Yahoo IDs).

    What I really hate about this though is my every day Yahoo ID is tied to another flickr account -- so I'm going to have to create a specific one. Argh.
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    Note that in the past few days, so many people made a stink about the Snap thing that several blogs took it down...

    Huh... I just got an email from some PR company regarding SmugMug's counter-offer. Sheez. These people move fast.

    Being a blogger is getting more and more amusing, not to mention time consuming.
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    I hardly have enough time to be a blog commenter, let alone a blogger (hence the tumbleweeds rolling through my blog right now), so I can only imagine the time it takes to be a "real" blogger. Plus when I blog, it's not the sort of things that gets noticed by PR companies. They tend not to care about what I think about "24", or why it seems my entry titles contain an equals sign way more often than normal.
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    The funny thing is I don't see myself as a "real blogger" either... yet I keep getting strange tugs from other parties that seem to think otherwise... this is one of those hobbies that seems to be snowballing. Now it may be clearer why I have no time to cultivate an avatar in Second Life :)

    I've used the equal sign to some humorous effect (Blog = Dog, Apple = Cat PC = Dog)

    Oh and brevity can work too... I wish I had come up with this idea: Movie Reviws in Haiku.
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    Hi This story has developed somewhat as you'll see at the last part of my blog post here (scroll down tioll you see the large screen shot!

    http://digitalmavericks.blogspot.com/2007/01/op...
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    As one of the people linked to in this post, I feel compelled to comment. Ignore the fact Thomas Hawk is from Zooomr because what he is saying is a reflection of fact. People are pissed off, and I'm one of them. I've been a long time Flickr user but I haven't had a working Yahoo! ID since maybe 97 or 98, in the same way I don't have a Microsoft Passport (hotmail) id either, nor did I want one. The old system at Flickr worked fine, and they've been running dual logins for at least 12 months with no issues. So they want to force new users to have a Yahoo! ID, fine, but why force existing users to? Have you ever tried getting a Yahoo ID? it's no easy task, I've got a fairly unique name (indeed, there are about 4 people on the entire planet who share my name...now beat that :-) ) and yet I couldn't register it nor variations of it, in the end I came up with my full name with an 07 at the end of it..but it took far, far too long. I've got no desire to use other Yahoo services, their email is second rate, De.licio.us is soo yesterday, and aside from their TV Guide (no login required) I never visit their sites. A lot of people like me didn't kick up a stink when Yahoo! bought Flickr because we were promised that things wouldn't change, indeed by Caterina herself, and yet now were forced into the Yahoo! machine. I'm not leaving Flickr over it, but others will...and yes, Zooomr stands to gain, indeed I'll be checking them out for the first time seriously in the next couple of days....if this all sounds melodromatic, understand that Flickr users are like a tribe, their heavily dedicated to the service, and they don't like it when things are messed with. That sort of passion should be encouraged, not rallied against, which is what Yahoo is doing.
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    Hey Duncan, feel free to voice your opinion, that's why I have comments here. Thanks for visiting. It will be interesting to see Yahoo!'s reaction - what aspects of Web 2.0 (put the user first) they are absorbing.
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    Flickr has lousy and amazingly slow customer service, along with a big dose of "we're holier than thou." Screw Flickr.
 

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