In the wake ofYahoo ’s $ 1.1 billion accomplishment of dear social platform Tumblr , it ’s perhaps worth looking back what the fellowship did after it catch — and gutted — another big Pisces .
https://gizmodo.com/its-official-yahoo-is-buying-tumblr-508846808
Yes , Yahoo ’s a unlike company now , especially with Marissa Mayer at the helm . And Tumblr , along with its price rag , are an order of magnitude big than Flickr was when Yahoo bought it . There are differences . But the fib of how Yahoo ingest and then eroded a dear attribute ( first published on Gizmodo almost precisely one year ago ) remains the cautionary tale for how acquisitions can go faulty . And if anything , a design for what not to do if Yahoo wants to get it right this prison term .
In fact , now that Yahoo hasfinally invested significant resourcesin Flicker — years and year subsequently — you could learn this as something of a comeback story . -BB
https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-completely-redesigned-flickr-508948823
Web startup are made out of two things : people and code . The people make the code , and the codification makes the people rich . Code is like a verse form ; it has to watch over sealed structural requirements , and yet out of that structure can come art . But code is artwork that does something . It is the assembly of something firebrand young from nothing but an idea .
This is the chronicle of a wonderful melodic theme . Something that had never been done before , a moment of change that mold the net we do it today . This is the story of Flickr . And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the agency .
Do you remember Flickr ’s tatter bloodline ? It reads “ almost sure enough the near on-line photo management and sharing app in the globe . ” It was an epic humble line-shooting , a momentously tongue in buttock understatement .
Because until three years ago , of class Flickr was the best photo share-out service in the world . Nothing else could touch it . If you cared about digital picture taking , or require to share exposure with friends , you were on Flickr .
Yet today , that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing . The picture avail that was once poised to take on the the globe has now become an reconsideration . Want to share photos on the Web ? That ’s what Facebook is for . Want to look at the picture your friends are snapping on the go ? Fire up Instagram .
Even the notion of Flickr as an archive — as the plaza where you store all your photos as a backup man — is becoming more and more quaint as Dropbox , Microsoft , Google , Box.net , Amazon , Apple , and a host of others throw together to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops .
The internet site that once had the safe societal tool , the most vivacious userbase , and toppest - mountain pass memory board is speedily passing into the irrelevance of abandonment . Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a lodging crisis . Yards gone to seed . corrode bikes in the front yard . shattered flag . At destination , after name and address , after computer address , no one is home .
It is a case subject of what can go wrong when a quick , innovational startup gets gobble up by a behemoth that does n’t share its values . What happened to Flickr ? The same thing that happened to so many other spry , innovative startups who sold out for dollar sign and bandwidth : Yahoo .
Here ’s how it all buy the farm defective .
In the Beginning
Flickr famously set out as a lineament of another product . Husband - and - wife development team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake had make a pic sharing feature of speech for another intersection they were working on , Game Neverending . Butterfield and Fake were old - school vane types . The kind with low-pitched Metafilter substance abuser numbers andWELLaccounts .
And because they knew the entanglement so fluently , they shortly realise that their literal product was n’t the plot : It was this secondary feature of speech , the ability to partake pic online . This was 2003 , and photo share-out was still very much a refreshing problem for the great unwashed . Flickr was born .
It was a hit . Bloggers specially loved it , as it solved an years - old photo hosting job . ( This was during the hoary erstwhile day of the internet when store really cost money . )
Two years afterward , in 2005 , Butterfield and Fake sell their ship’s company to Yahoo , whose deep pocket predict great things for Flickr ’s users . It up the monthly storage limit to 100 Mbit for free user , and removed it altogether for pro accounts , for example . Yahoo had bandwidth and technology to burn . Things were going to be great ; things are always go to be great the first prison term you embrace a raw corporate mother .
When Startups Become Successes
Very few people manage to work up successful inauguration . But when the one hit , it can change the status quo in an instant . of a sudden , those two elementary ingredients — people and code — become very valuable to the established companies that seem to repose on an inaccessible corporate Mount Olympus . It would have to be an consuming compliment and sense of validation . How would you handle it ? What if you made something beautiful and utilitarian that interchange the position quo ? Would you sell it ? Would you deal yourself ?
That ’s the choice successful startup founders are face with . establish something ripe , and the buyout proffer start roll in . But while selling out in most other fields of creative endeavour is frown upon , it ’s a give on the Web .
mayhap it should n’t be . For every YouTube , there are horror report of majuscule hoi polloi with great mathematical product , waste in the yawning yap of uncaring corporate integrating . Dodgeball gets lost in Mountain View . dear bookmarking services like Delicious become fields of information left fallow .
Some upstarts take an autonomous path . Consider Foursquare . Or Twitter . Or Facebook . Each rejected buyout fling , and none has ever been stronger . All managed to find a business model over time . Or even StumbleUpon , which only notice its feet after its beginner re - purchased his company from eBay and spin it off again as an indie .
Flickr falls into that pack .
Integration Is The Enemy of Innovation
“ Yahoo was a good fit ab initio , ” say Flickr co - founder Caterina Fake , who leave the company in 2008 . “ We had offers from various companies , including Google , and I honestly intend that Yahoo was a great shop steward . It was a great steward of the brand . It was allowed to thrive . In the subsequent two long time after the acquisition , Flickr blossomed . ”
Yet even early on on , there were sign that the transplant — which had seemed so successful at first — was going to fail . That the DNA did n’t match . This was largely due to how this raw member was grafted on by Yahoo ’s CorpDev department .
When a new startup comes into an found company , the first paries it typically hits is CorpDev , or corporate development : the group within a business that manages change . CorpDev is normally charged with design corporate scheme — where a business will grow or shrink , the market it will enroll or leave , and what form of contract and heap it may strike with other companies . It often manage acquisitions . It plans them . approve them . And then it sets the terms .
When a big company gobbles up a littler one , often only a fraction of the money is pass over up front . The relaxation comes later , based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the route . It ’s similar to how motivator are build into the contracts of professional athletes , except with engineering benchmark instead of home runs .
Corpdev sets these milestone . They reflect the reason for the acquirement , and how the companionship — in Flickr ’s case , Yahoo — can leverage them . They ’re baked into the mass , and an acquisition integration team begin go immediately to verify they are meet . Typically , they ’re very technology - found , designed to integrate the low company ’s intersection into the tremendous collective machine .
And because payment schedule are ground on achieving those CorpDev terms , it signify both companies have a vest ( pun signify ) interest in place those milestones forwards of novel feature film . They are a sledgehammer applied with great force to the feet of nimble growing . defective , they often all ignore what made the smaller target worthful in the first blank space .
Take Upcoming , the calendaring site Yahoo buy not long after Flickr . It was a play to get local list . Local data — especially in smaller cities or for smaller events — can be very hard to come by . Everyone ends up having the same stuff . But Upcoming ’s information was user - get . It was unlike . Unique . Valuable .
The milestones for that acquirement were all based around integrating that local event data into Yahoo . Yahoo did n’t care about Upcoming ’s users — the community of interests that created the data . Yahoo ’s attack release out to be entirely backward . The value of the the company was determined by the index itself , rather than how the index was built — which is to say , by the community .
It was a arresting failure in imaginativeness , and more or less the same affair happen at Flickr . All Yahoo like about was the database its users had built and tagged . It did n’t like about the community that had create it or ( more significantly ) continue to grow that biotic community by introducing new feature .
“ We spent a lot of time in meeting with CorpDev just champion the product and vindicate our decisions , ” said a former Flickr team member .
And so when Flickr hit the ground at Yahoo it was crushed with engineering and help requirements it had to converge as per demands of the acquisition consolidation team . Those were a waste pipe on resources , human being and financial . Even though many of the resources do from Yahoo , they were debited against Flickr . This created an indefensible bicycle that actively hampered innovation .
“ The money goes to the cash cows , not the hard cash calf , ” explain one former Flickr squad member . If Flickr could n’t make bucks , it would n’t get bucks ( or talent , or resources ) .
Because Flickr was n’t as profitable as some of the other bigger dimension , like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports , it was n’t given the resources that were dedicated to other product . That think it had to pass its resources on integration , rather than innovation . Which made it hard to attract newfangled users , which meant it could n’t make as much money , which meant ( full round ) it did n’t get more resourcefulness . And so it live .
As a result of being resource - starve , Flickr relinquish planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher . It missed the gravy boat on local , on real clip , on mobile , and even ultimately on societal — the subject area it pioneered . And so , it never became the Flickr of TV ; YouTube snagged that ring . It never became the Flickr of hoi polloi , which was of course Facebook . It remained the Flickr of photograph . At least , until Instagram number along .
The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration , not innovation . This played out in two fundamental areas .
Socially Awkward
Flickr ’s best feature is n’t what you think . It ’s not photo - share-out at all . Just as photograph sharing was a feature of speech hide out within a game , there was another feature article hidden within picture - communion that was even more brawny : social networking . Flickr was , intimately a decade ago , build what would become the Social Web .
The first point in Flickr ’s two distributor point mission statement is to aid people make their picture usable to the people who count to them . Flickr had — and still has — excellent tools for this . Flickr was an former land site that let you identify relationships with fine grained controls — a soul could be marked as family but not a friend , for example — instead of a binary friend / not admirer relationship . you may check your photograph “ private ” and allow no one else to see them at all , or identify just one or two trusted friends who may view them . Or you could just divvy up with Friend , or family . Those granulose controls encouraged share-out , and comment , and interaction . What we are describing here , of form , is social networking .
It ’s intemperate to think of , but back in 2005 , Yahoo seemed like it had its plot on . After losing out on search dominance to Google , it snapped up a bunch of small - but - nerveless socially oriented companies like Flickr ( societal pic ) , Delicious ( social bookmarking ) , and Upcoming ( societal calendaring ) . There was a real sense that Yahoo was doing the ripe matter . It was , to some extent , out in front of what would come to be wide known as entanglement 2.0 : the participatory net .
It was a gateway , nothing more . This was hardly an innovative idea , or technically complicated to draw off . You do n’t have to write algorithms to build a portal . Yahoo was little more than an electronic version of Yellow Pages .
The laminitis ’ influence on a troupe ’s cultivation is tremendous , and Yang and Filo care about business , not products or creation . They did n’t nurture a polish of computer scientists , like Google ’s founding father did , or naturalise hackers like Facebook . They grew a byplay culture . For many years that figure out quite well — until Google total along . dead nobody postulate directories any longer . Why browse a hierarchy when you may jump directly to what you ’re looking for with a simple query ?
Yahoo ’s CEO Terry Semel hadfailed to buy Google in 2001 , when he had the chance . Now Yahoo was so focused on winning search that it essentially surrendered social . In 2005 , Flickr had far and by the best social connectedness and discovery tools on the Internet . Remember , back then Facebook was still very much a fledgling service , one that did n’t even let you upload pictures other than the one in your profile . Yahoo , meanwhile , had existing internal social product , like Address Book and Messenger . Social was clearly the future . What Yahoo want , however , was n’t the future . It was to re - fight an old battle from the past times . It was to beat out Google .
“ By the meter we were looking at Flickr , Yahoo was start out the shit kick out of it by Google . The slipstream was on to find other arena of search where we could establish a dominating leading , ” says one high rate Yahoo executive conversant with the deal .
Flickr offered a mode to do that . Because Flickr photos were give chase and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users , they were highly searchable .
“ That is the rationality we bought Flickr — not the residential district . We did n’t give a bullshit about that . The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections , it was to monetize the image index . It was totally not about social community or societal networking . It was surely nothing to do with the substance abuser . ”
The first community trouble became manifest when Yahoo decided all existing Flickr users would involve a Yahoo score to sign in . That switchover pass in 2007 , and was part of the CorpDev desegregation operation to establish a single planetary house on . Flickr set it to go live on the Ides of March .
From Yahoo ’s perspective , there was no alternative but to revamp the login . For one , Flickr had grown internationally , and it had to focalise to follow with local laws . Yahoo already had tools to lick this , because it had already expanded into other country . It offered a ready - made solution .
But moreover , Yahoo needed to leverage this thing that it had just bought . Yahoo wanted to make certain that every one of its registered user could immediately use Flickr without having to register for it separately . It wanted Flickr to work seamlessly with Yahoo Mail . It want its armed service to sing together in harmony , rather than in cacophonic closing off . The first step in that is to create a incorporate login . That ’s heavy for Yahoo , but it did n’t do anything for Flickr , and it for certain did n’t do anything for Flickr ’s ( extremely outspoken ) users .
Yahoo ’s RegID solvent turned out to be a nightmare for the subsist community of interests . You could no longer use your existing Flickr login to get to your picture , you had to use a Yahoo one . If you did not already have a Yahoo account , you had to create one . And you did not even enter on Flickr ’s rest home page , upon arriving , you were immediately kicked over to a Yahoo login screen .
Although Flickr grew tremendously with the huge inflow of Yahoo drug user , the subsist biotic community of extremely influential early adopters was exasperate . It was an inelegant passage , and seemed to ignore what the community wanted ( namely , a fashion to lumber in without take to sign up for a Yahoo account ) . This was the opposite of what people had total to expect from Flickr . It was anti - societal .
And it very much render a content , to both user and to the squad at Flickr : You ’re part of Yahoo now .
That substance was also going out to Flickr ’s team . Flickr pride itself on client care , which it considered a core part of community building . But Yahoo wanted to wield all that itself with its be departments . One of Yahoo ’s goals was to move from a system of notice and takedown , to prescreening all the depicted object members posted before it went up online . Flickr saw this as both a costly time - consuming chore and one that could very well offend its fellow member privateness , peculiarly when talking about secret pic . The Flickr squad scheduled a meeting and headed down to corporal headquarters in Sunnyvale for an 60 minutes long presentation to make its case . midway through the meeting , the frailty president who manage client aid for Yahoo looked at his watch , announced he had another coming together , and left . It was an open screwing you .
For Heather Champ , who was Flickr ’s head of biotic community at the prison term , the meeting was the beginning of the end . “ I get out of that coming together knowing I could n’t continue in my role . I did n’t require to stay and keep an eye on them dismantle everything we ’d cultivate so firmly to build up . ”
By mid-2008 , a year after the RegID debacle , it was clear to most everyone that Facebook was the cock-a-hoop up - and - arrive social mesh . What had been a plaything for college kids and high schoolers was of a sudden the net your mom , your dad , your gymnasium coach , and everyone else you ’d ever assemble was post you friend postulation from . Microsoft was pumping money into it , and it was fast approach 100 million users .
Inside Yahoo , which itself had a massive user pedestal and multiple social products , some were already warning that it was going to be bypass in social just as it had been bypassed in search .
“ I spent years at Yahoo prove to indicate the alarm that Facebook was run to take over the adult market unless we mistreat in and used our exist social networks to fight back , ” bewail one former Yahoo engineer who process on products at both the parent company and Flickr . “ plain this never go anywhere for a multitude of rationality . ”
Yahoo had already seek to grease one’s palms Facebook in 2006 — for a billion goddamn dollar . And fail . Two old age afterwards Facebook was too large to buy . The only path to beat it was to add up at it from another direction with a better product . Yahoo ’s good Leslie Townes Hope for that was Flickr . But by then it was too recent .
“ Flickr was n’t a startup anymore , ” explains the technologist , “ people did n’t really desire to exercise that hard to twist the entire product around . Even if they had , Flickr [ was ] very tekki hippie , many did n’t apply or like Facebook and considered it bland , boring , vicious , poorly design , etc . , and were certainly not ready to tight watch it . Emphasis was put more on how thing depend , and felt , rather than on metric and on what act upon . The whole experience was very thwarting for me all around , as I tardily find out Flickr and Yahoo fade into irrelevancy . ”
The Unstoppable Force And His Immobile Object
There ’s a difference between a overlook opportunity and a accomplished shag - up . When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr ’s societal potential , that was a miss opportunity . But if you want to see where it all fucked up , where it just butcher Flickr with tedious knife and duller wit , turn over on your phone and launch the Flickr app . Oh , what ’s that , you do n’t have one ? precisely .
Flickr had a full-bodied mobile internet situation fashion back in 2006 — before the iPhone even shipped . You could use it with your piece of crap Symbian earpiece , or the dinky screen on your Sony Ericsson T68i . But it was basically just a internet browser . If you want to get a photo from your earphone to your account , you had to email it .
And then in 2008 , something happened that made the mobile internet a sideshow altogether : apps . The iPhone ’s App Store ushered in a novel earned run average that changed the way we interacted . citizenry did n’t require mobile web experience that required them to vamoose from a camera app , to an redaction app , back to the entanglement and possibly even over to email to upload and share an image . They need an app that did all those things . The Flickr squad sympathise that . Unfortunately they could n’t do anything about it .
“ Flickr was not endue to build its own Io app — or any other mobile app for that matter , ” laments one former Flickr executive . “ You had this external squad with strong opinions as to what the app should do . ”
It was here that the foreign mission of the two company truly collided , harmonize to insiders . The Flickr app was a top - down determination , driven by Yahoo Mobile and its loss leader , Marco Boerries . The team at Flickr was ice out .
Boerries had a hoity-toity visual sensation for something call in “ Connected Life . ” It was to be a socially seamless nomadic experience that institute all your Yahoo services together in the palm of your hand , and join them with the desktop . It was nothing shortsighted of what Apple and Google and Microsoft are all trying to do today with their cloud strategy .
Boerries was a maniac . He ’d built a word processing programme called StarWriter as a 16 year - erstwhile kid , acquire it into the StarOffice entourage and sold it to Sun for $ 74 million in 1999 . By 2004 , he was running around Silicon Valley giving a demonstration that was literally make mass gasp in wonder .
He would take the air into a way full of investors , pull out his crappy insolent phone , and take a depiction of the elbow room . Then he ’d pocket it , open his laptop and refresh the app run on his screen background . Suddenly , the visitant in the room would be confronted with their own sceptical aspect . It was robotlike . He then explain that he could do the same thing with any other case of datum — emails , phone number , mp3s , whatever . Anything you did on the telephone set would be seamlessly reflected on the desktop , and frailty versa . Basically , it was iCloud .
Yahoo buy his caller in 2005 for something in the neighborhood of $ 16 million , largely to bribe Boerries . A month by and by , it would buy Flickr .
Boerries was a genius , and , by all accounts , a incubus to work with . One of the most frank depictions of this comes from Kellan Elliot - McCrea , Etsy ’s CTO who , in a preceding sprightliness , was the master designer of Flickr . On Quora , he writes :
“ Marco Boerries was without a doubt one of the most viciously political , and dislike Yahoo ! execs and he dominate for 4 years over the Yahoo “ Connected Life ” team which had general control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo . Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native roving experience ( going back to 2006 ) were squashed relentlessly . ”
The Yahoo Mobile team was onerously slow to get an app out the door . Although the iTunes App Store launched in July of 2008 , Yahoo Mobile lease a year slip by before it eject an official Flickr app . When it eventually did range out the long - stay beast in September of 2009 , it was beyond disasterous . The earlyreviews on the iTunes App Storeread like pre - alpha trial Federal Reserve note of the world ’s worst software .
“ Not enough functionality to be utilitarian ”
“ it is dull and seems to slow down more with use ”
“ Was very excited about this app only to be let down . Hard . ”
“ slow , buggy , fearsome navigation . ”
“ everything is distressingly dull ”
Among other trouble , it would n’t let you upload several photos at once , you had to go in manually submit them one at a time . It was downscaling photos to 450 x 600 , remove epitome caliber . Users had to sign in via Safari rather than in the app itself . It was leach EXIF datum from photos as they upload — incisively the kind of affair Flickr ’s photo nerd wanted to see .
hoi polloi . Fucking . Hated it .
The app shoot down like a pile of mud on a wedding gown . As one App Store reader put it , “ For uploading to Flickr , this is really the worst app I ’ve sample ; you ’re serious off just emailing photos direct from the phone in that respect . ”
It somehow make out to get Flickr ’s two key military posture — exposure communion and storage — completely wrong .
mayhap tough of all — at least from a business concern perspective — you could n’t sign up up for a Flickr account from the app . ( In fact , you still ca n’t . It kick you over to the Web to sign up with Yahoo if you want to register as a novel user . ) While other apps draw users into their Web service ( think Foursquare , Twitter , Facebook , and notably Instagram ) the Flickr app that Yahoo Mobile ramble out had no chemical mechanism for that . It was not a recruitment pecker . It was just for exist users .
“ That was a big oversight , ” say Fake . That ’s an understatement . It was the female parent of all flub .
Meanwhile , all style of new apps were appearing that would not only snap photograph for you , but swear out the images too . Things like Best Camera and Camera Bag were introducing consumer to the approximation of go for automatic filters to their mobile photos . A little over a year after the Flickr app hit iTunes , another photography app come along that work out much like a quicker Flickr . It was called Instagram .
Today , it all seems too late . The iPhone is the most popular tv camera on Flickr , but the feeling is n’t common . Flickr is n’t even among the top 50 free photography apps in iTunes . It ’s just below an Instagram knockoff in 64th place . By way of equivalence , an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your picture is 23rd .
If you ca n’t bewilder laser cat , you in all likelihood deserve to pop off .
What Next
Flickr ’s mobile and societal nonstarter are in the end both symptoms of the same problem : a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up modest ace , and then wasting what it has . The history of Flickr is not that unalike to the story of Google ’s buyout of Dodgeball , or Aol ’s leverage of Brizzly . Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities , dashed upon the rock’n’roll of gawky companies invade with frailty President .
As a result , Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago . It ’s an Internet backwater . It ’s not socially appealing .
Recently , Flickr rolled out a “ Justified ” view , a way of life to scan your friends ’ recent photos where they are all set together like puzzle bit . It ’s similar to the way Pinterest lays out image . It ’s a spectacular , gorgeous way to await at photos — that mostly highlights how rarely many the great unwashed update now .
As I scroll down I note that friend after ally has quit posting . At the bottom of the varlet I am already back in mid 2010 . So many of my friends have disappear . It feels like MySpace , circa 2009 .
This is anecdotic , sure , but I stick to many of these same multitude on other networks ( Path , Facebook , Instagram ) where they tend to be very active . I see photos of the same citizenry , with their same children and their same dogs — all reckon a year or two sr. than on Flickr .
There are other signals as well . OnStellar.io , a favorites aggregator that tracks what masses are linking on Twitter , YouTube , Vimeo and Flickr , the latter ’s links go wrong to show up even day by day in my flow . And of row , there is thatdamning Quantcast traffic chart .
Despite twelvemonth of neglect , Flickr ’s miniscule yet highly gifted team is trying urgently to right the ship .
Flickr began the year by drink down off a slew of feature article that did n’t really make sensation — like Photo Sessions , a baffling feature that let you show real meter slideshows of your picture to other multitude that had Yahoo written all over it . It ’s also hustling to roll out many more , like that newfangled Justified View and an Uploader that runs on HTML 5 . It replaced its photo editor in chief ( formerly Google - owned and now defunct Picnik ) with and HTML5 tool called Aviary , which lets hoi polloi make changes to their photos without leaving the page and will play nice with tablet . It ’s designate pro member photo at 1600 and 2048 pixels now to take advantage of Retina Displays .
Flickr ’s product manager Markus Spiering notes that his team get what it needs from Yahoo now . ( Of of course , you ’d also assume he has to say that . But still . )
“ We do have a lot of resources which are also within the main ship’s company . The people you see on the About page are the core squad you see on San Francisco , but a fate of the horizontal development efforts are divvy up . ”
And that hat Yahoo - only login ? Gone .
“ We do n’t worry so much about what kind of passport you have — a Google ID , Facebook , ” he aver . “ At the same metre , we lease you share your persona to various place . There are a lot of solid and prosperous to see privacy control , and we see ourselves as the centrepiece .
“ That ’s where we ’re push Flickr towards where it ’s a beautiful , photo centrical experience . But whatever you are using , it gets your photos there . ”
Mobile is still a disaster . Flickr ’s iOS app , though amend from the one it vagabond out in 2009 , is still just awful . It still requires you to lumber into Yahoo via Safari , for illustration . And it does n’t offer even the most canonic of exposure editing or filters that seemingly every other photographic camera app bring home the bacon .
“ I believe I can honestly say that especially on iOS we need to offer a sound Flickr experience in terminus of our own app , but that ’s something we are working very severely on , ” says Spiering .
So let ’s say Flickr lastly gets it together . permit ’s say it repair its app , reinvigorates the residential district , and finally make back on path . The question is : Is it too belated ?
It ’s under flak not just from Facebook and Instagram and , hell , TwitPic and Imgur ( Imgur for piece of ass ’s sake ! ) but also the the likes of of Dropbox , Google Drive , Skydrive , and Box.net . Not to mention Apple ’s iCloud and PhotoStream , Google ’s Picasa , and yes even Google+ , which does machinelike photo uploads from Android handsets in glorious full resolving complete with geotags and EXIF data .
A comeback does n’t seem probable .
Flickr is still very worthful . It has a monumental database of geotagged , Creative Commons- and Getty - licensed , bailiwick - tagged pic . But sadly , Yahoo ’s steady border district of incompetency does n’t bode well for making use of these valuable properties . If the cyberspace really were a serial of tubing , Yahoo would be the leak sewerage pipe , cover everything it come in contact with in watered - down shit .
Flickr ’s last best hope is that Yahoo realize its economic value and decide to reel it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a last death volute . But even if that materialise , Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance . People do n’t be given to get back to homes they ’ve already desolate .
Flickr is still pretty marvelous . But it ’s lovely in the same manner a corner of old photos you ’ve stashed under the bottom is . It ’s an archive of nostalgia that you love dearly , on the rare occasion you falter across it . You pull up them out , and hold them up to the sparkle , and think back a time when you were younger , and the Web was a more affirmative place , and it really was almost certainly the good online photo direction and sharing app in the world .
And then you end the box .
And you click over to Facebook , to see what ’s raw .
Image : Shutterstock / Vince Clements
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