The almost inevitable backlash against the ever-emphatic net giant Yahoo!'s purchase of Flickr is beginning, as this piece in Wired attests.
Disgruntled German artist and Flickr user Thomas Müller has set up Flick Off, in a bid to spread his anger about a coming change to users' Flickr logins. As I type more than 850 people have joined the group, who are threatening to kill off their Flickr accounts (overdramatically referring to this as "the Flickr Accounts Mass Suicide Countdown group") if Yahoo!/Flickr proceeds with plans to force users to log in with a Yahoo! ID in a change that will take place by early next year. The idea of melding Flickr logons with the Yahoo! mother ship is deeply disasteful to some users: as James Sharpe comments on Flick Off, " I don't want to join with Yahoo, if I'd have known this was going to happen I would have never joined Flickr in the first place."
Others, though, are less bothered. Will Merydith says: "Honestly, I don't understand the point here. I must be missing some key piece of information because from where I'm standing this whole 'protest' seems childish. You should call this group 'Flickle'."
Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield is honest and phlegmatic about the whole thing on Flickr blog:
We screwed up in not having better answers and a better explanation up before the changes went live - we'd been so heads-down in working out the code that we didn't anticipate all the questions. And unanswered questions can be freaky - if you don't know why it is happening or how it works, it is easy to let your imagination run wild and come up with a pretty bad scenario. But it's not bad.
He goes on to handle the brickbats being thrown at him by angry Flickr-ites one by one, but his key message is this: "Your Yahoo! ID is just what you use to sign in to Flickr, it is not how you need to present yourself to the world."
As Jack Schofield points out over at Onlineblog, this is a storm in a teacup: but it's one that neatly illustrates the problem for small net companies such as Ludicorp (which owns Flickr) when they're bought by one of the big boys of Silicon Valley.
When I met Butterfield during a press trip to Yahoo! HQ in San Jose, California last week, he was keen to emphasise the benefits of being part of the Yahoo! family: not least the range of other services (such as VOIP and instant messaging) that Flickr users will be able to take advantage of. He admitted that there are people who object to Flickr's new parent company, but some people just hate change of any kind.
Butterfield also indicated that it wasn't in Yahoo!'s interest to tinker too heavily with the delicate and constantly changing Flickr community - for instance, the photo sharing site isn't yet linked from the Yahoo! front page. It will be fascinating to see whether bringing Flickr under the Yahoo! brand umbrella allows the site the stability to grow and thrive, or whether it loses its grip on the net zeitgeist for good.
