More Flickr/Yahoo stuff

BBC news: Flickr to require Yahoo usernames

Bruce Sterling's take on it: Meanwhile, in Privacy Invasion Land.

Of course there's a lot of stuff floating around where a lot of noobs can't see what the fuss is about. 'Oh it's just a log in - it doesn't matter - get over it'. Well actually it's more insidious than that - it's a whole change of ethos.

Flickr was built on good will, sharing and community. It was about interaction and comments - in short it relied on the users. It's that which made it a service worth paying for. Now Yahoo on the other hand... their bottom line is advertisers - their users are generally seen as eyeballs for banner adverts, and they happily, sneakily track their users movements on the web - collect and sell on that information. They have 'web beacons'-in other parlance that sort of thing is known as 'spyware'. (Up until now being 'old skool' and not using a yahoo ID to sign in with I've been spared that. But once I've been forced to change over - I'll have yahoo tracking me even after I move off the Flickr site and onto other sites. Lovely. Part of the whole Flickr PRO deal is to not be shown adverts on Flickr but I'm guessing Yahoo will still be collecting info on me to know what adverts to show me next as soon as i move off the Flickr site. I'm sure this is the real reason why they're insisting on an Yahoo ID. They won't know that it's utterly pointless because I use Adblock. Even so the reason I stopped using much Yahoo stuff was because of the incessant and intrusive advertising.)

The Flickr acquisition was supposed to mark a sea-change in that whole staid corporate attitude Yahoo has - after botching up eGroups and Geocities, they set their sights on the community buzz they saw around Flickr. Unfortunately they haven't learnt much - they're still good at pissing people off.