Yahoo told to Flick off
A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic “mass suicide” to protest closer integration with the website’s new owner, Yahoo.
The portal giant bought Flickr’s developer, Ludicorp, for an undisclosed sum in March and took ownership of the site when it moved from Vancouver, Canada, to Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, California, campus this summer. Now, angered by a new requirement to tie their member profiles with Yahoo accounts, some Flickrites say they plan to kill off their identities before they can be moved into the new family next year.
“If Flickr really forces me to join Yahoo in 2006 in order to still use my account, I will quit 24 hours before the deadline,” wrote Thomas Müller, a Hamburg, Germany-based artist who shows more than 1,400 photos at the site. On Wednesday, Müller created a protest group, Flick Off, that has attracted almost 400 members.
At stake is a new user-profile stipulation that reads: “We will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo’s network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo ID (or link your account to your Yahoo ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account.”
“This comes after many of us have invested so much time and effort; it makes it a chore to do anything except bend over, grab our ankles and smile,” said Dana Smith, a San Francisco-based Flick Off supporter whose photographs rank among Flickr’s most interesting material.
nathan
Hey them’s the ropes. Yahoo! is nearly as evil as bleached flour, but soon they’ll be unveiling a real version of Television on the Web and you’ll all forget about it.
I, on the other hand, will stand with my right hand raised to the sky and shout “For it is with me that ye shall stand.”
Punishment will ensue and the good people of Tallahassee will finally see the humor in their town’s name.
And now, for some cookies.