metlin's Journal: The Yahoo! Flickr Fiasco: Listening to your customers

Today, I just received an email that Flickr has given a deadline for us "Old Skool" members to merge our accounts with a Yahoo! account.

Not only has the Yahoo!/Flickr crowd squarely ignored user and customer needs, they have gone ahead and done something that the users were explicitly against. Already, a lot of the users on the Flickr forum have asked if they could cancel their membership.

And here are the reasons that I think this was a big mistake on Yahoo! and Flickr's part.

Doesn't anybody take lessons in basic business practices anymore?

Big biz doesn't always mean good sense

[nizo]

I am not familiar with the whole flikr/yahoo thing, but sometimes you gotta wonder what the big internet companies are thinking. Like google thinking youtube was worth a billion dollars. I mean when ebay bought paypal that completely made sense. Personally I think the youtube thing is going to bite google in a big way with the whole copyright infringment problems.

Re:

[Anonymous Cowpat]

true - even if they avoid the pack of rabid dogs that is The Lawyers by getting rid of the copyright material post-haste the site won't be worth anything anymore. I don't actually want to see a wobbly video from someones camera phone of them falling off a skateboard. What I want to see is Monty Python skits.

Re:

[metlin]

It's the whole Garage Kubrick [wikipedia.org] thing that William Gibson was talking about.

Except that the Garage Kubricks would probably have better things to do than to spend their time saying, "L000SER!" [sic] on stupid-video forum.

Re:

[metlin]

I have absolutely no idea what they are thinking. Remember the Information Superhighway bullshit metaphor during the DotCom boom? That's how the Web 2.0 boom sounds to me.

I think the reason the big companies buy out these guys is for the existing community, which would make sense, I guess.