The Flickr Tradeoff
Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 12:23PM by Charlie O'Donnell A long time ago, I switched my Flickr account name to my Yahoo! screename. Why? Because they asked me to and because I basically use the same signin for everything anyway, so it really wasn't such a big deal.
And eventually, it will probably happen with MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, too. Seriously... who cares? It won't make me use any more Yahoo services.
And why don't I care? I don't care, because, at the end of the day, I'm glad the little startup where I store all my precious photos got bought be a big profitable company.
Yahoo! has lots and lots of servers and they're unlikely to ever completely go out of business. So, if I had a choice between signing in to Flickr with my Flickr vs. signing into Yahoo! and giving me a better shot I won't have to move any of those photos in the remaining 58+ years of my life, I'll take the Yahoo! ID and signin.
It's the same as when your bank gets bought by a bigger bank and they give you a new card with new numbers. It's a little bit of a hassle, but your money is probably safer at Citibank than it is at First Fifth Third Bank of Saskachawan.
I'm not pissed off. I'm thankful that such a great service exists, no matter what I need to enter in the box to login.
Reader Comments (5)
Thomas Hawk probably is an avid flickr user(if you follow his blog/photography you would know). I dont think his rant have an alternative motive to it.
-Charlie
You don't care because it doesnt affect you as it does affect the power flickr users like thomas.
When a company has a mammoth code base, every exception can add *significant* added cost in coding.
Just one example - if Yahoo were to introduce a new feature where Flickr users accesses another Y site, it would have to deal with people with and without Yahoo userids. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but in reality, it is and can add lots of use cases and lots of coding.
As for the rest - the #of contacts etc., it is hard to reduce the number. I would instead have told them to cap it at the person who has the max. That way no one is forced to cut people out.