here is my metaphor:
if we are “old skool”, why we need to pass the entry exhamination again?

*I had a yahoo account 5 years ago but it’s impossible to recover (I invented all my info, and of course I don’t remember anything) so now I can’t use my username :(

With Flickr I had my preferred id. With yahoo, there’s no chance, because all good id’s have already been taken by spambots and other evil things. I have a yahoo id, but that is only to collect spam email, and I would not even dare to announce it in public, so I will need to have *yet another* yahoo id. And that, frankly, sucks. Even that id took like 20 attempts, because all the id’s I could think of were already taken, until I started inputting random Finnish curse words into the system.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there are good replacements right now for Flickr. But yeah, I’m pissed off enough to switch if I could find a new one that I could use a good id on.

Having had a little more time to think about this issue (aside from my three posts the other day), this is what I think is at stake. The romantic notion that people have held about community in relation to social networking has been revealed to be just that: a romantic notion. What “community” means, really, is getting critical mass for your service so that you can sell it to Google or Yahoo or Microsoft.

Call me naive for thinking anything other than that when looking at these social networking web services. I for one will never look at another online service again in quite the same way, knowing that by virtue of my free labor a group of people may very well make millions of dollars, all in the name of “community”.

I suppose that sounds like a bunch of homesteaders complaining about the new neighbors 10 miles away.

But, you may argue, nothing’s really changed at Flickr with all this Yahoo business. Mechanically it’s all the same (OK, with some login changes). Ah, but what *has* changed is the story—and I think this is key—the story that went in hand with the community that we all created. Building Flickr was very much a group effort on the part of both the creators and the people who supplied the photos and the comments and the community, and I think that in this process everyone became at least a little invested. Perhaps that feeling of investment was misinterpreted to mean ownership as well.

I’m getting kind of tired sounding like a broken record on this issue, so that’s about where I’ll leave things.

Yes of course I should probably be more mad at Yahoo than anyone else, it’s harder to get mad at a company with no face or forum and nothing that’s particularly appealing to me at the moment apart from this particular piece of virtual real estate that is Flickr.

I’m not angry either, takes a lot for me to be angry, just a bit ticked off : ) besides i dont think i’m the only person to share that feeling and if i am, well that would make me more special then ;)

It isn’t as if the people who work at Flickr want this, they’ve fought it off from Yahoo as long as they could but at some point you don’t have any more arguments to make, they did their best to make it as painless as possible for everybody involved.

I don’t know what your personal experience with Yahoo has been, but Flickr has remained a very special group within it and they’ve done everything to keep what made them special in spite of Yahoo’s acquisition, I feel getting mad at Flickr for this is misplaced, Yahoo, if anyone, should be the target of your ire.

I personally think it a bit exaggerated to get angry in the first place, if you haven’t already picked up a Yahoo account somewhere in the course of being on the internet you are definitely the exception rather than the rule, and beyond the idea of signing up for a Yahoo account if you somehow don’t have one there isn’t anything painful here.