Yahoo is in the digital doghouse lately after they made what many see as a bonehead move and walked away from talks with Microsoft. Stocks crashed on the news and it hasn’t really recovered since the drop. Now we have news that the co-founders of Flickr are leaving the company.
Flickr is and has been one of the bright spots at Yahoo. The photo sharing site is extremely popular and very easy to use. I myself use Flickr for my photos online and I actually have a Pro account which costs me $25/year.
Flickr was founded by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, a husband and wife team, in 2004. According to Techcrunch, Fake left last week. Butterfield will be leaving on July 12th. Valleywag has posted the resignation letter of Butterfield, which seems like the rantings of an insane metallurgist.
So, the question is this: Is Flickr now threatened by the exodus of it’s co-founders? Is Flickr now at the beck and call of a company which can’t seem to figure out what the hell it is supposed to do? It sure seems that way.
Like many, Flickr is really the only reason I have a Yahoo login. I only hope Yahoo doesn’t go changing anything. If they’re smart, they’ll leave it as is. Otherwise, we could be stuck with crappy design ideas like this one from the old Yahoo Photos site.
The big question this leads to is this: Should you move your photos off of Flickr?
The answer is: NO. Flickr is still the leader in online photo management and it has serious momentum. We will watch to see what Yahoo does with the site. For anyone worried about the recent stock drop and seeing that as a sign that Flickr could eventually unplug, my view is that we are a long ways from that. Yahoo is indeed in a transition period – one which they could either come out the other end in great shape or find themselves folding. Yahoo needs to figure out what the hell their main product is and quit being the schizophrenic Internet company that it is now.
So, I’m not moving my photos – yet.
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I have been watching Flickr out of the corner of my eye for some time; and recently I have been very tempted to try them out. (I had a friend at college called Flicker; and was tempted to try her out more than once; but never succumbed to temptation in the end. ( – Enough gay fantasy.)) Now with this fiasco my wariness appears to have been wise. (I jumped in to Facebook rather too soon and nearly got egg on my face one way or another – Or should that read “Egg on my Facebook”?(To clarify; IMHO Facebook is a fickle waste-of-time that could and should be spent doing something to make onesself money rather than make Facebook’s coffers larger and kid onesself that one has loads of “friends”))
In my opinion both Flickr and Yahoo will never recover unless Yahoo return somehow to the Microhoo table: Even then Flickr could still end up the victim of its own commercial impetuousness.
If Microsoft had succeeded in buying Yahoo, it’s practically a given that Flickr would have changed, probably not for the better. From my standpoint, I’m pretty sure the free fantasy sports would have disappeared, as well, and in many respects the Yahoo versions are superior to those on other sites. Speaking as a user of some Yahoo services (but not email and the like), I’m glad the buyout didn’t take place (and the fact that it infuriates Carl Icahn is just icing on the cake).
He’s either insane or a metallurgist: he can’t be both. Third possibility: a bit of a jokester.