Flick off!

Since it’s start in 2002 Flickr has seen an enormous success. Flickr’s design is clean, lean and simple – giving room for the stars of the show: the photos and photographers.

Something fundamental about the Internet: stuff like Flickr is not hip because of their interface design. They are hip because of their independence, their spirit and their smartness.

Flickr was a playground not only for everyone taking pictures, but also for professional photographers. It didn’t play a role that hobbyists were populating the ground, because Flickr was pure and focussed on photos. No ads and no “other services you might buy in” nags were polluting the space.

In March 2005 Flickr was bought by Yahoo and now users are required to get a Yahoo account if they want to use the Flickr service in future. But users don’t want to be forced into the family of services Yahoo wants to sneak in.

Now Flickr users are protesting (see Wired article). It seems they feel like Yahoo stole their photos to enhance the other crap they want to offer (especially because most frequent users have paid for Flickr). People feel like being the ones that made Flickr: without their photos Flickr would be a waste of CPU time.

Yahoo once took over intellectual property of Geocities users (or at least intended to “secure” itself for new Geocities accounts). There are just not enough reasons to trust Yahoo.