Three strikes, and we’re out - of luck.
I kept meaning to blog about this, but forgot: Yahoo! has acquired Flickr, as most of you probably know already.
I am not sanguine about the results of this merger. While I’m not necessarily anti-change, and I don’t care to be a panic-monger, Yahoo! has not endeared itself to me over the last half-decade. First it took over GeoCities, and ran it into the ground – previously, GeoCities had been a fairly community-driven site (I was one of the Community Leaders, and put in a hell of a lot of volunteer time). After Yahoo!’s acquisition it lost any charm it may have had.
Then Yahoo! took over Webring.org (which it had previously owned, but had left alone), bollocksed up everyone’s ring management tools, forced unpleasant advertising and unhelpful management interfaces down everyone’s throat, and generally ruined Webrings as a useful tool. (Yes, I was a webring administrator; I was starting to feel pretty put-out with Yahoo! by this point.) Thankfully, a former Webring.org tech took the reins again when Yahoo! divested itself of the webring business, and the system is at least functional again.
And now Yahoo! has acquired Flickr. Pardon me if I don’t leap for joy. Flickr’s people say not to panic; “We’ll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here.”
Well, of course they’d say that. LiveJournal gave exactly the same spin when 6 Apart bought them. And, honestly, I’m sure LJ and Flickr people both believe that, or they might not have sold out.
But once someone else owns you, all bets are off. You can hope as much as you like that they’re going to stick with the nifty and appealing ethos that’s led to your indie cred and/or world-crushing popularity – but they OWN you, and they sign the cheques.
So far, Yahoo! are two-for-two on screwing with useful and popular web facilities. I’m crossing my fingers that Flickr stays cool, but the future doesn’t look too bright from where I’m standing.
Technorati Tags: flickr, yahoo, acquisition, www
March 27th, 2005 at 9:41 pm
“We’ll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here.”
Didn’t GeoCities and Webring say the same thing?
March 29th, 2005 at 3:51 am
I would imagine they probably did.
In any case, I can’t see how Yahoo! buying Flickr is a good thing. At absolute best, it’s neutral.
April 6th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Hey, another Community Leader. Which neighbourhood did you look after?
April 6th, 2005 at 10:50 pm
TimesSquare, from memory. I can’t remember which bits, though.
April 7th, 2005 at 11:37 am
I used to look after SouthBeach and Wellesley. The place really went downhill after Yahoo’s takeover.
August 30th, 2005 at 2:40 am
Sigh… I used to live in Hollywood Theater. Do they even have those terms anymore? Actually, looking back now, they were really horrible URLs, but it was such a nice place. But my biggest grudge with Yahoo lies with webring. The webring I managed had thousands of sites and it was a wonderful community. After Black Tuesday we failed to secure a single member, and ultimately I lost control of the ring completely (due to some issues when trying to transfer it to my Yahoo ID). Customer service never replied to me, and I never got it back, and no one ever signed up again, because the ring homepage was kicked out of the ring. Now there are barely over 10 members left. Every time I write about it I get so sad… I really put a lot of my time into it.
Frankly, I’m not expecting a bright outlook for Flickr.