From: FlickrHQ
Subject: Update for Old Skool membersDear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th 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.
It seems that everyone is up in arms about recent changes at Flickr:
- Flickr and Yahoo! accounts must be merged into a Yahoo! login. If you have multiple Flickr account then you’re logging in and out of Flickr all the time, now do it with Yahoo! Surely you do most of your Flickr work in one account anyway, so why not make that the one your main Yahoo! account?
- Tags and Contacts are going to be limited. I see that this would affect a tiny minority of the userbase on Flickr, unfortunately for Flickr it’s likely to be the most active (and vocal?) membership. I also feel for Thomas with his Where I’ve Been Lately image because a lot of those tags will be removed but does anyone else have more than 75 legitimate tags on a photo? I’m sure I only have 15 at most on mine. Limiting contacts will hurt the most prolific users of the site such as Thomas Hawk, but others are probably just spamming the system.
Yes, the changes to tags and contacts will hurt a tiny minority but for almost everyone on the site it won’t make any difference. Yes, the change to using Yahoo! IDs will mean Yahoo knows about your photos, but if they know about your email and stock portfolio already what are you worried about? They’ve got more than enough demograpic data to go on to market to you!
Unfortunately I can’t recommend Zooomr either because their service is so slow – images take an age to download, and when they do download, they aren’t cached by the browser. It’s really frustrating using Zooomr.com when it’s so slow as it has so much potential and the people behind it are so smart and full of ideas! Fix the slow connection, caching and add a “blog by email” feature and I’d be over to Zooomr faster than you can say “Flickr sucks!”
There are plenty of pissed off Flickr users, but I’m not one of them. Have a nice day!
Update: Treasa is as upset as I am! Oh Lordy!
Update 2: Richard isnt worried either. Definitely a storm in a teacup.