Flickr and the mass ID Suicide
Flickr is not a service, it's a social network. When people join a network, they seek community. Up until its Yahoo! acquisition, the services that Flickr offered for photo management also happened to be top quality; utilizing the latest technologies, offering a generous API, good cross-browser compatibility and a continuous enhancement of features through Beta. Just as importantly, the environment was cosy, with Flickr staff both good humoured and responsive to user feedback and groups of users forming genuine visual links between their lives. The small group of people who built Flickr obviously loved what they were doing. The broad but niche community of users obviously loved what they were communally accomplishing.
What happens when this gets assimilated into a service for a larger company like Yahoo!? Well, you get softly spoken demands to open a Yahoo! account in order to benefit from continued (paid for) Flickr services, followed by a lot of user paranoia, some clarifications, a Flick Off anti-Yahoo! user group and a lingering (perfectly valid) question,
I don't use any Yahoo! services. Why should i sign up to their network?
This is the question coming up again and again. It shows the psychological influence a popular network like Flickr has on its members. The attitude towards Yahoo! can be summed up as,
I don't belong there. I belong on Flickr. The two are miles apart.
In a tight network such as Flickr, membership to the network has real meaning to it's participants. It is a place with ethical co-ordinates and aesthetic values. It is virtual and yet it is not - Flickr had to pack bags from Canada and move to Silicon Valley. All acquisitions are symbolic, as well as physical/business transitions.
The Flickr team say the Yahoo! acquisition will allow them to integrate a lot of services including payment, but i must admit i'm all for successful startups resisting the temptation of acquisition, seeing a product through version 1.0 and pulling in resources independently. I'm also all for social networks not hankering after boundless growth - it can impede the social quality of the network for a lot of users.
Assimilation is certainly not the only option, since well crafted API's and strategic partnerships can deal with integrated services without a loss of corporate identity (if there's one thing Flickr had and is slowly losing, it's a strong identity around which a meaningful community can evolve). I'm suggesting resisting the lure of scaling up and putting the focus on increased features, finely graded account types and integrated services as a means of avoiding acquisition.
Perhaps the results of the David VS Goliath 'tag-fight' sum up the user-base's stance on the acquisition better than anything else.
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