RSSFlickr Users in Uproar Over Login Policy
By Ed Oswald | Published February 1, 2007, 2:54 PM
Flickr owner Yahoo has decided to phase out the separate login for the popular photo sharing site, instead opting to use its own system. While the search engine says the change is intended to make it easier for Yahoo to integrate Flickr into other services, some diehard users just aren't having it.
Yahoo further justifies its decision by mentioning the fact that only one out of every 20 users still uses a non-Yahoo ID. The company originally intended to support both authentication options when it acquired Flickr in March 2005, but changed that policy later in the year.
The old system will be discontinued on March 15, 2007. After that day, all account holders will be forced to use a Yahoo ID in order to sign into Flickr.
"We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year," Yahoo explained in an alert to Flickr users.
That won't be a problem for many. Most users have since adopted the Yahoo ID login process. However, a small but vocal minority refuses to do so. Some of the holdouts hold several Flickr accounts, and under the new policy, they would be required to register for a separate Yahoo account to access each account.
Over 1,366 replies have since been posted to a Flickr Forum topic asking for comments on the move, many of them have been negative.
"Flickr and Yahoo could and should grandfather people into their system who have been here for a while and created the reason that Flickr even got bought in the first place," a user who used the handle 'girltim' complained.
"The experimental, alternative vibe it had in the days before Yahoo is long gone," user 'flickrthrope' lamented. "It's been a slow death, one accomplished through a thousand cuts. So it's on to pastures new."
Yahoo has remained fairly tight-lipped in responding to criticisms, only offering that the changes simplified the sign-in process, and the company would continue to focus on innovation and new functionality for the site.
Is flickr free? I don't know I don't use the service. But if it's free, then if management wants to do something, then deal with it or leave. It's not a hard choice.
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|Looks like Yahoo is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But then yahoo's only doing what many other corporations do... Vis a vis, Corel, Adobe, Microsoft... ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
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|Watch this happen later this year with Google and MySpace. I'm not sure why people are whining about Flickr / Yahoo's username system merging - that's a GOOD thing as far as I'm concerned. Thus, Yahoo will soon start offering Flickr's features with Yahoo! Mail and other apps - just as MySpace will start utilizing Google's technologies and stop sucking.
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|The "yahoo" sign in process sucks on so many levels, and to make it worse, if you aren't a regular Yahoo user and forget your password you might as well forget about that account.
As a long time Flickr user this is definitely bad news.
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|What exactly about the Yahoo log-in process sucks? Enter your username, enter your password, hit submit. Big deal.
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|I still have a website up that I cannot access, courtesy of Yahoo! taking over GeoCities. My login details were changed - just I was never notified. Now there is no known way for them to give me access to my account, even after requesting it on several separate occasions.
Yahoo! just likes to **** with things, IMHO. Can't leave well enough alone.
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|Yes, because everyone knows progress is bad.
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|"If it ain't broken, don't fix it."
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|...um... who cares? This is considered news?
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|Once again Yahoo! seems to think it knows best and forget what people want. I can't really think of a good change that company has made in the past couple of years. From horrible new homepage to the worthless change to TV listings, Yahoo is trying its best to make every person leave and go to Google.
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|I have to agree with pv845. And it's been going on for years. Early on it was chat rooms going to pot, then some things like maps (good, but google's was much better). Then the weird changes to profiles and the half assed moved to push people to myspace-ize their stuff in Y360. Now a great TV listing page which was fast and searchable destroyed by a forced use of "web2.0" junk and Flickr getting thrown into the acquired-and-forgotten collection. Does google have an answer to flickr yet?
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|well google doesnt have anything to do with it. but there is always photobucket
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|Google actually has their own photo/storing/sharing environment, at Google-Picasa's Web Albums.
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