CoffeeBear.net

“Flick” This Controversy

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers, Life, Software

It’s cer­tainly been a cou­ple of bad days for Flickr and Yahoo!. First on 30 Jan­u­ary 2007, Flickr made a cou­ple of very unpop­u­lar announce­ments. Here’s the full-text of those announcements.

30th Jan­u­ary, 2007

A pair of items for your attention:

1. In our ongo­ing efforts to Make Flickr Bet­ter®, we’re intro­duc­ing two addi­tional lim­its: 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.

We love your free­dom, but, in this par­tic­u­lar case, lim­it­ing these things will actu­ally improve the sys­tem per­for­mance, mak­ing pages load faster across the site for every­one and cut out some unwel­come spammy behav­iors. Both of these new lim­its apply equally to free and pro account members.

If you have ques­tions or com­ments about these changes, we’ve opened a topic in Flickr Help.

2. 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.

We’re mak­ing this change now to sim­plify the sign in process in advance of sev­eral large projects launch­ing this year, but some Flickr fea­tures and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go pro­gram for mobiles, avail­able at http://go.yahoo.com.

If you still sign in using the email-based Flickr sys­tem (here), you can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you con­tinue using your account.) To switch, start at this page: http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Com­plete details and answers to most com­mon ques­tions are avail­able here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

If you have ques­tions or com­ments about sign­ing in with a Yahoo! ID, speak up!

Then Yahoo! decided to start using pic­tures posted to Flickr for their new Wii por­tal. As near as I can tell no announce­ment was made about this; they just started doing it.

To many these things seem petty an unim­por­tant but it’s caused quite the uproar in the Flickr com­mu­nity and said uproar is bleed­ing over onto other sites (e.g. Digg). Are these things really worth all the anger spilling out? It’s all a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. The new lim­i­ta­tions on con­tacts and tags aren’t any­thing I forsee as caus­ing me prob­lems. I don’t have any­where near that many con­tacts and can­not imag­ine hav­ing them. As for 75 tags, that seems like it would take an obses­sive amount of work to get that many tags on a photo.

Since that’s more of a none issue let’s move on to one caus­ing a much big­ger stink, the forced merger of people’s Flickr & Yahoo accounts. For those unfa­mil­iar, Flickr used to be a sep­a­rate com­pany. Back in those days one could sign up with Flickr using noth­ing more than an email address¹. Sign­ing up with Yahoo! requires con­sid­er­ably more detailed per­sonal infor­ma­tion. This by itself is enough to cause some peo­ple to be very ner­vous about merg­ing their accounts. There have also been reports about peo­ple hav­ing prob­lems merg­ing their accounts and con­cerns about how Flickr/Yahoo! will han­dle some peo­ple hav­ing mul­ti­ple Flickr accounts. Espe­cially since Yahoo! has a habit of delet­ing accounts they think are inac­tive if you don’t log in fre­quen­tally enough. It’s a lot to take in and many of the “Old Skool“² Flickr users aren’t happy about it. While I do have a Yahoo! account, I’ve yet to merge my Flickr account with it. I liked hav­ing them sep­a­rate, but very soon I won’t have any choice. While I sym­pa­thize with the Old Skool­ers, I’ll be comb­ing my accounts before the dead­line and find the excite­ment over this issue to be more than a bit overblown.

The last issue is prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing as from a quick read­ing of Flickr’s TOS and an imme­di­ately small knowl­edge of copy­right law; this seems like a sticky wid­get of a sit­u­a­tion. Accord­ing to Flickr’s TOS, any images pulled from Flickr must link directly back to that photo on Flickr. What Yahoo! did with their Wii Por­tal is to take thumb­nails and ini­tially link to a sec­ondary page before link­ing back to the orig­i­nal photo on Flickr. Plus, Yahoo! was orig­i­nally just grab­bing any photo on Flickr tagged with Wii. This included pho­tos marked as © All Rights Reversed and pho­tos marked with Cre­ative Com­mons licenses for­bid­ding com­mer­cial use. This angered even more of the Flickr com­mu­nity and Yahoo! did even­tu­ally change their Wii por­tal to only grab pho­tos with appro­pri­ate licenses.

Per­son­ally, I any one of these issues would be enough to stir up a hornet’s nest of trou­ble within the Flickr com­mu­nity. But hav­ing all of them hap­pen so close on top of one another was enough to really get some people’s blood boil­ing. Will I be aban­don­ing Flickr over all this? No, I like the com­mu­nity too much and I still plan on inte­grat­ing this gallery on this site more into Flickr. How­ever I will be keep­ing a much closer eye on where Yahoo! takes Flickr as we move on into the new year.

¹ For the free accounts any­way.
² This is what some of the Flickr users who signed up in the pre-Yahoo! days call them­selves. For the record, I also signed up (for a free account) in those days and I don’t con­sider myself an Old Skool user.