The hot news of the day is Yahoo’s decision to shut down Yahoo Photos and migrate everyone to Flickr or another photo service of their choice.
According to Stewart Butterfield:
We are *not* merging Flickr and Yahoo! Photos together and this has no impact on Flickr’s feature roadmap, overall direction, brand, independence of the team, etc.
Yahoo! Photos users will be able to move to Flickr, but they’ll also be able to move to four other competing services (Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak and Photobucket). They’ll also be able to download their original images, order CD backups or get prints at discounted prices.
The goal is to have people end up with a solution that makes them as happy as possible — if that’s Snapfish because it is simpler and serves their printing an family sharing needs better, then super. If they would get value out of using Flickr, that’s also super.
I take a dimmer view. One of the most wonderful parts of Flickr has been their community. People don’t simply upload their photos to Flickr and send emails to their family; they become part of the rich Flickr community. Part of that community is commenting, faving, inviting and enjoying others’ images. Disclaimer: For years I have considered Yahoo to be a slum when it comes to community — an anything-goes, no-holds-barred Las Vegas of online communities, so take that bias into account when considering my dim view on this.
Since Flickr IDs were merged with Yahoo IDs, I’ve seen problems at Flickr that I hoped wouldn’t invade. My photos have been faved by people intending to use them for their own profit, trolls have driven by some of my favorite groups and taken a shot, and hackers played some serious games with people’s heads and accounts at the end of March. I attribute a large part of this disruption to the accessibility that the Yahoos had when their ID worked seamlessly with Flickr, since it was concurrent with the merge.
Yahoo’s decision is a sound business decision. I never really understood the logic of acquiring Flickr if they didn’t plan to do something with it. Running parallel and arguably competitive verticals side-by-side didn’t make a ton of sense, provided community factors were taken out of the equation. But what makes Flickr different from other photo sharing sites is their rich, connected community of people who are loving, discovering, or learning photography and the new and innovative techniques they’re inventing through Flickr connections.
According to the Techcrunch article, there are 2 BILLION — that’s BILLION — photos stored on Yahoo photos. If just 25% of those migrate to Flickr (whether they receive a free Pro account or the limit on the number of photos is lifted on free accounts), that will double the current number of photos on Flickr, and certainly increase the membership exponentially.
Flickr’s growth over the last year has been amazing as it is. I see it in the groups I belong to. In the past year, the community that I’ve been mostly connected with has been diluted, with some defecting or simply falling away without notice. As with any community, whether virtual or real, when there’s rapid growth inevitable problems with crowding and crime also arise. A town doesn’t double in size overnight without some serious growing pains and neither will Flickr. In Flickr’s case, those pains are most likely to affect their community and the home-grown feel that has given Flickr the distinctive edge over other photo sharing services. It was a photo sharing site that was built on the foundation of community, and I don’t see that continuing if there’s a huge influx of new users from a site built on sharing, storage and printing first and foremost with community integrated as a recent afterthought.
I have been an unabashed cheerleader for Flickr over the past year, but it hasn’t been without reservations. As they’ve grown, I find myself less willing to step out of my little corner of Flickr with the group of folks who first welcomed me there. It’s overwhelming. So I’ve been watching Zooomr carefully, because they’re on the verge of a release that promises to be innovative and community-centered. Kristopher Tate wrote on his blog last week that Zooomr may end up in hiatus as a result of the withdrawal of some of its initial funding. If any VCs happen across this blog post by accident, let me URGE YOU to fund Zooomr, because I suspect there will be some Flickr refugees like me that may seek that small, hometown feel that first landed us at Flickr.
I’ve had my Zooomr account since last year and am considering a permanent switch. I suspect many others will feel the same way, so now is the perfect opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an up-and-coming company with a boy-genius developer. Maybe all of us who are interested in preserving the Flickr community feel should dig in and chip in to keep Zooomr moving forward (see this suggestion in the comments), because when the Great Migration happens, Flickr will be forever different from the Flickr we’ve known and loved.
Technorati Tags: Zooomr, photo sharing, Yahoo, Yahoo photos, Techcrunch, Thomas Hawk
