Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't really see what the hub-bub about Flickr and Yahoo merging is all about. If Flickr suddenly makes all of my photos vanish, I'd be pissed off, but I don't really see that happening, nor do I forsee Flickr/Yahoo suddenly asserting copyright control over everyone's pictures. Too much PR risk inherent in any such aggressive move. Maybe I'm biased since I've had a Yahoo account for a long, long time. It mostly gets spam, but that's how I use it.
I'm actually more concerned about how exactly the new photo printing service is going to work. I shrink my photos for display on screen, as probably everyone does. Will there be bandwidth restrictions for uploading print versions? My photoshop images tend to be around 50-100 megs, and even compressed as jpgs, these are large files. When Geo-cities was purchased by Yahoo, the disk space/bandwidth was lowered.
Wired News: Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off!
A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic “mass suicide” to protest closer integration with the website's new owner, Yahoo.The portal giant bought Flickr's developer, Ludicorp, for an undisclosed sum in March and took ownership of the site when it moved from Vancouver, Canada, to Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California, campus this summer.
Now, angered by a new requirement to tie their member profiles with Yahoo accounts, some Flickrites say they plan to kill off their identities before they can be moved into the new family next year.
“If Flickr really forces me to join Yahoo in 2006 in order to still use my account, I will quit 24 hours before the deadline,” wrote Thomas Müller, a Hamburg, Germany-based artist who shows more than 1,400 photos at the site. On Wednesday, Müller created a protest group, Flick Off, that has attracted almost 400 members.
At stake is a new user-profile stipulation that reads: “We will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo's network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo ID (or link your account to your Yahoo ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account.”
Tags: flicker
