Future of Yahoo and Flickr
Flickr announced yesterday that it has been acquired by Yahoo after months of rumors and speculation. Flickr is not just a photo sharing, photoblogging service, but a community of closely knit members – some fearing an end to the community as it may become aligned with Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Photos. Flickr members spoke out about the acquisition today, some supporting the move of selling out of Flickr to Yahoo with messages of congratulations, others condeming the move.
Well going forward this can only be a good thing so congrats! I read the post by Jeremy Zawodny and was not too impressed to tell you the truth. He talked about the Flickr team, the interface, and doing photo sharing well. What about the great community that Flickr has built? That is most important. You can build a killer app but it is nothing without the community. This is one of the only services through which I have met many great people through, and that means alot to me. I like the idea of Flickr taking over Yahoo rather than the other way around. Yahoo could use you guys. They have fallen flat on some things, but they are still one of the most powerful forces on the net. It will be interesting to see how they can bring all of these great services together.
“I got a sinking feeling here. Yahoo has a bit of a shady history when it comes to the rights of its users and its users’ content, not to mention advertisements plastered EVERYWHERE on ANYTHING owned by Yahoo. If I start seeing Yahooism creeping into Flickr, I’m OUTTA here faster than you can say ‘corporate sellout'”
“I’m happy for the Flickr folk, but feel the same as some others about the possibility of forced logins instead of photos being public as they are now. And yes, ads, too.”
“I think this is a good move for the Flickr folks. However, I am wary of the huge influx of users. We have a nice community here, and it *will* get somewhat jostled, if not outright destroyed. That being said, I’d go for the money, were I Flickr.”
” Congrats peops .. I reckon this is a dream come true for a developer .. And a great compliment to your work!
Hopefully Yahoo doesn’t get too much input into Flickr, since Ludicorp does a good job, together with Flickr users .. I love developers that actually listen to their users ..
Keep up the good work!”
I loath Yahoo. I left it because of an atrocious privacy policy. I’m now very glad that that I kept a disposable email address in my Flickr profile. I can’t imagine myself extending my Pro account past the current expiry date. I guess I’ve got about 9 months to find another service.
“Yahoo isn’t my favorite search engine (for obvious functional reasons), and they have one of the ugliest portals ever (although the ancient webcrawler.com gave them a run for their money), but obviously they must have competent management to stay around for so long. If the flickr team stays, and yahoo backs them, I’m all for it.”
Yahoo’s awful privacy policy,oversized blinky-twitchy ads, cluttered design, slow database response, and lack of mac love make it something I try to avoid at all costs.
Then there is the whole geocities mess, where a lot of us lost our usernames eventually. In no way do I want my Flickr account linked to my Yahoo account.
I’m happy for Flickr’s success, but very sad to see what looks like the end of Flickr as we know it.
More reaction on the Yahoo acquisition can be read on the FlickrCentral Forums
