On Jan 30, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Flickr Mail wrote:
Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based
Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require
Yahoo! IDs for sign in – like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.
95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don't. You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you'll be required to merge before you continue using your account.)
To switch, start at this page:
http://flickr.com/account/associate/
Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here:
http://flickr.com/help/signin/
Thanks for your patience and understanding - and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you're reading this, you've been around for a while and that means a lot to us!
Warmest regards,
- The Flickreenos
*Look, FlickR, I completely understand your commercial reasons for doing this, but I don't trust Yahoo. You were once a groovy little photo club while Yahoo is way, way into massive datamining. I don't want to belong to Yahoo any more than I'd want to belong to msn.com or googlemail. Of course I'm already aware that Yahoo is combing all those tags and photos looking for something they can sell me, or sell about me — but my refusal to join Yahoo! served as one small political indicator that I rather like FlickR and don't like invasive Web 1.0 behemoths. To have Yahoo imperially dictating these measures to me doesn't make me like Yahoo any better. It would cost
Yahoo NOTHING to allow me to sign in by another method; the fact that they insist on my reduction to yahoo-hood is a tactless indicator of their bad intent.
*I'm an old-skool member for old-skool reasons. The fact that you don't mention those reasons in this oleaginous piece of PR is alarming.
What, I'm supposed to do this because "ninety-five percent"
of the other kids play nicely? Come on. A peer-pressure argument, that's what's in it for me? If ninety-five percent of the other
Flickreenos sold out to Big Brother, would you pinch your nose and jump right into the cesspool, too?
I don't gain any benefit by this. Where's my value proposal?
There's nothing in this proposal for me. You are exploiting your Web 2.0
social muscle and twisting my arm here. Is that FlickR -like behavior?
Aren't you a little ashamed of yourselves? Google would have at least done a few dont-be-evil headfakes around a bald power maneuver like this.
No wonder they're wiping the floor with Yahoo.
Cooling regards,
brucesflickr
