flickr – yahoo = zooomr?
Most people by now knew that flickr, an incredibly popular image-sharing service which I also make use of once in a while has been acquired by Yahoo! quite a while (almost exactly two years) ago. Most of this time, flickr was usable to both those who were “old-school” flickr members who just had flickr authentication credentials and those who tried logging in there using their Yahoo! account. This now has sort of changed: Starting February 15, 2007, you need to have a Yahoo! account to actually use flickr.
Technically, I can understand this as indeed maintaining two ways of access authentication might be painful (even though one should consider this a pain that easily might be addressed at a very low level given a good software architecture). However, there also has been extensive criticisms on flickr being part of Yahoo! because of the way Yahoo! more than once (ab)used pictures posted by flickr users. I am not sure about this. Likewise, I haven’t really been that much enthusiastic about all the “Camera Guide” / statistics around flickr recently simply because I think talking about imaging and photography should be about pictures and works rather than about tools and equipment. By now, I still enjoy hanging around at flickr simply because of the fact that so far this has been the only site explicitely providing me with a fine-grained choice of CreativeCommons-licenses for my pictures.
Anyhow, by today I also signed up for an account at zooomr, which so far seems to be rather promising – let’s see what will grow out of this. Probably services like this might attract quite a bunch more people now that flickr is ‘Yahoo!ed’ even a little more…