Flickr username conversion holdouts |
Talk about being defiant, I’ve changed my mind and am joining the holdouts from converting my friendly, fun Flickr username to my boring, played out Yahoo ID. Strangely my Yahoo ID is almost the same username as my Flickr one. Doh! 
I’ll get to my holdout reasoning shortly but first some history and a reminder disclaimer that I own Y! stock.
I don’t like this. I have multiple Yahoo IDs. They are disposable, in part, because Yahoo is disposable. My loyalty to Yahoo is non-existent. Their email sucks. The IM client is a bloated pig given years of creeping featurism with continual incorporation of crap the doesn’t work and users don’t want. In short, I’m not a Yahooligan.
Clifford Pearson likes using Gallery instead of Flickr, which is one of the services we’ve been demoing in the Hmm Labs. I’ve never really been a regular Flickr user, preferring like Clifford, to host our own most of our images, but I did give it a B+ grade clear back in July 2004. I liked Flickr’s creative use of Flash.
Rachel at License to Roam listed the concerns of diehard Flickr users:
- The inability to stay logged in or to use other Yahoo accounts at the same time
- Why do I have to give them all this info to sign up with a service I don’t want.
- I have to get a Yahoo email address and if I don’t use it, it gets deleted and my Flickr account will go.
- I’m going to get spammed by Yahoo.
Being Rachel’s post was written January 2007, I wonder if she and others in the spurned Flickr camp have since given into the mighty Y with the exclamation? Which was more important, Flickr service with Y! or voting with their feet?
Not holding out here for any of the reasons I’ve seen others mention. My change in heart really isn’t a change at all over what I said in August 2005. Just felt combative this morning when I saw the message shown at the top of this post. Actually, I believe most holdouts will be like me: changing when they actually need to change.
Yes, I’ll give into the Y! when I actually need to do something at Flickr which could be later today or a year or more from now. Yahoo should continue to offer an export function for the “old skool” members who want to get all their content out of there quickly and easily. I’m sure somebody will point out that there’s been a couple months for disgruntled Flickr users to clean out their lockers, but now the only way to do that appears to be converting to the Y! ID and then exporting, yes/no?
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But Cliff Pearson also likes spending all day upgrading Gallery, which he did just yesterday.
I’m amused at the reaction people have over this change. I got a Y! ID ages ago when I wanted to get a developer key for some of their APIs. I’d entirely forgotten about it until the merge (which I only did yesterday), but it worked fine and hadn’t expired as Rachel suggests. I don’t use anything else at Y!, and they haven’t spammed me or demanded any more of my attention (which I admit I was afraid of).
The fact is, I was willing to change because I can’t find a better service. And though Cliff likes Gallery for religious reasons, even he can’t claim that his time + bandwidth is cheaper than the $25/year for Flickr (or that Gallery is anywhere near as slick as Flickr).
Comment by Casey Bisson — March 21, 2007 @ 12:12 pm PST
Appreciate the feedback, Casey.
Yes, $25 a year is pretty reasonable. For that matter you could probably even get cheaper by going with Amazon S3 if someone is concerned about cost. But then that person wouldn’t have the Flickr social functionality with S3 …
Comment by TDavid — March 21, 2007 @ 12:22 pm PST
Let’s clear some things up… First of all, it did take me more time than usual to upgrade gallery yesterday, but I was also trimming the thing down from a “Full Install” to a “Typical Install” so I had to one-off a few plugins to make everything work the way it is supposed to. That includes my WordPress integration, which remains far better in terms of presentation than anything Flickr can offer.
There were also some issues surrounding data directory permissions that resulted from my having moved servers. Not wanting to simply chown -R 777 the directory, I had to hunt for a bit to find the files that had the incorrect ownership. It did NOT, however, take me the whole day… I would say I spent about two hours on it all told.
I use Gallery not for religious reasons, but rather because I do not want policy surrounding my content subject to change at someone else’s will. Once I start putting files up on Flickr, linking to them, and depending on them to be there, Flickr can change the rules of external linking at will and I then have to pick up the pieces and change all of those countless links.
Bandwidth is a legitimate concern. If you host your own images, you incur the bandwidth hit when someone loads them. I think we can agree, however, that in our WordPress installs MySQL usage goes up much faster than bandwidth and most hosting plans that can handle the CPU have more than enough pipe for image hosting. I’ll stick with Gallery because I like controlling my own content. If I didn’t, I would be using wordpress.com.
Comment by Cliff — March 21, 2007 @ 12:39 pm PST
I don’t think a Yahoo login can expire as I’ve had mine for about 7 years and after I got over chatting, I rarely had cause to use it. When I joined Flickr in November 2003 and saw it was linked with Yahoo, I tried my Yahoo login and was surprised it worked as I hadn’t used it in probably over a year. I still didn’t use Flickr very much until mid 2005 and became a paying member February 2006. I don’t remember ever using Yahoo e-mail, and I stopped using the IM tool after I stopped chatting… so again it’s my belief that a username doesn’t expire. As long as you can remember your password (or get access to a new one), the integration with Yahoo is a moot point.
I host my own domain and I don’t believe I’ll ever run into bandwidth problems with my pictures, but Flickr is so easy to use and has many more options than I would care to try to emulate with a gallery of my own. You can’t discount the community aspect, either. As well, within the last few months I discovered Picnik (http://www.picnik.com/) which allows you to edit your Flickr pictures online and update instantly. Hallelujah is all I can say.
If people already have a Yahoo login, then what’s the big deal. If you’re interested in Flickr enough to have _signed up for it already_, then who the hell cares if it now wants to be tied in with your Yahoo username that you also _already have_.
It’s a different story if you don’t have a Yahoo login… one which I can’t really debate, but all I can say is, use a good e-mail service or get good spam protection if that’s your primary concern. Gmail is the only email service I use although I have multiple domains - again, I want things to be easy to use and have nice features. Access my email anywhere? Check. Search my e-mail easily by keyword instead of sifting through folders? Check. Good spam protection? Check. I’ve only seen spam reach my inbox maybe once every few months. I also have Firefox + a Greasemonkey script (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2210) installed that never even shows me the count of my Gmail spam, because who cares? I signup for a lot of services and can’t recall ever having an activation e-mail not show up in my inbox.
As for Rachel’s other two points:
- The inability to stay logged in or to use other Yahoo accounts at the same time
- Again, you already have a Yahoo login, so that’s half the battle. Obviously you have a dedicated personal computer if you want any service to keep you logged in 24/7… since I do as well and some services somehow can’t even manage that, I let Firefox remember all my passwords so all it requires to login anywhere is a click of a button. I’m sure losing 5 seconds is a big concern to you, too. Otherwise, you could run two different browsers and have one Yahoo login use one and your other Yahoo login use the other. That’s serious effort just to use multiple logins, though… and I won’t even ask why you need multiple Yahoo usernames (especially at the same time).
- Why do I have to give them all this info to sign up with a service I don’t want.
- Use fake information like most of the people on the internet. As long as you use a backup e-mail address you actually use, and the same secret questions you normally use, getting into your account if you forget your password shouldn’t be an issue.
All this debate over pros and cons I’m now seeing as a waste of my time - if you like the service, you’ll sign up for it (even if it requires using a third party). If you don’t like the service, don’t sign up for it.
Comment by Candice — March 21, 2007 @ 2:52 pm PST
“If people already have a Yahoo login, then what’s the big deal.”
Hi Candice - just a guess here, but I think the “big deal” for some people might be that people might not want to blend two different accounts and thus expose people in Flickr to the people in Yahoo. For those in that camp they can just setup a new Y! account though and merge into that so who knows?
Comment by TDavid — March 21, 2007 @ 3:15 pm PST