fubuki
my humble opinion on flickr's future
has the dust cleared? all the pike and axe swinging over? the kool aid all drunk up?
we've all tipped hats to the ludicorp crowd for their hard work and apparent success: good good good.
weve all heard the 'yahoo as corporate vampire to suck the vitality from young damsel Flickr' war cries
weve all heard the 'lets give Yahoo and peace a chance' faction.
Yahoo bought Ludicorp technologies. they filled a quality gap in their services. this is what businesses do - create or assimilate.
but...
Yahoo didnt buy Flickr.
sacre bleu!.
Flickr is you and me - and everyone in this community. Flickr is the addictive magic that fires up when really smart and very cool people gravitate to each other, share their images, their histories, their experiences - share, support, and inspire. we make the community, we build the bonds, the groups, the discussions. its our photography that fuels the site. the fotolog exodus proved to me that the community was platform independent. as fotolog suffered service outages and performance lapses, that rock solid talented core of fotologgers spread out, found a home with flickr and sent word back to their friends still in fotolog who later joined. they became us and we became them. i cant imagine a flickr now without Zen, Watturm, or Sabinche. they are flickr, you are flickr. its the people, not the platform.
Now look what we get from this acquisition: service will stabilize - forget Yahoo branding and marketing for a moment - Yahoo knows how to maintain a global web service, improvement cycles will increase because S & C & E and their great dev team will be able to focus on the app rather than bad power supplies, failed disks, fritzy networks. just a week ago we were critical of the frequency of maintenance outages. they will be less and less frequent until they are a faint 'back in the day' memory. there is no risk of ludicorp financially folding over and taking our work with them. stability and service are now assured.
yahoo will make some great moves that surprise all of us. yahoo will make some bonehead moves that tick off all of us. those are both guarantees. but will yahoo destroy flickr?
no. they cant.
you will. you can.
flickr is the community. its not the technology. flickr is what happens when you get your first great comment, your first testimonial, your first invitation to join a group, the first time you start a group and your people fill it up and it thrives - flickr is what happens when your contacts become friends and your friends become your family. the technology under flickr will change in the next year - it will certainly stabilize, we may see branding and marketing issues that offend our web aesthetics and sense of cool, but those are issues we can process and harangue through - but yahoo can learn from flickr and try to earn some street cred (i remem' when yahoo was hosted on akebono.stanford) which translates into loyalty from the early adopter smart set which guide the trends that the others will follow. if they maul things here over too bad (we know how bad things can get) the community will migrate to another hot, smart responsive site. thats the nature of the game here - yahoo knows this, ludicorp knows this, you and i know this.
yahoo will now have to earn the loyalty of this community if they want their investment to work. that means listening, cajoling, being responsive, being real. Stewart and Caterina have already won our loyalty time and again - and we have earned theirs.
But we are Flickr - we give spirit to this great machine, we give energy to this collection of great personalities and photographers - and we grow and strengthen and evolve with each new member.
in my humble opinion...
my humble opinion on flickr's future
has the dust cleared? all the pike and axe swinging over? the kool aid all drunk up?
we've all tipped hats to the ludicorp crowd for their hard work and apparent success: good good good.
weve all heard the 'yahoo as corporate vampire to suck the vitality from young damsel Flickr' war cries
weve all heard the 'lets give Yahoo and peace a chance' faction.
Yahoo bought Ludicorp technologies. they filled a quality gap in their services. this is what businesses do - create or assimilate.
but...
Yahoo didnt buy Flickr.
sacre bleu!.
Flickr is you and me - and everyone in this community. Flickr is the addictive magic that fires up when really smart and very cool people gravitate to each other, share their images, their histories, their experiences - share, support, and inspire. we make the community, we build the bonds, the groups, the discussions. its our photography that fuels the site. the fotolog exodus proved to me that the community was platform independent. as fotolog suffered service outages and performance lapses, that rock solid talented core of fotologgers spread out, found a home with flickr and sent word back to their friends still in fotolog who later joined. they became us and we became them. i cant imagine a flickr now without Zen, Watturm, or Sabinche. they are flickr, you are flickr. its the people, not the platform.
Now look what we get from this acquisition: service will stabilize - forget Yahoo branding and marketing for a moment - Yahoo knows how to maintain a global web service, improvement cycles will increase because S & C & E and their great dev team will be able to focus on the app rather than bad power supplies, failed disks, fritzy networks. just a week ago we were critical of the frequency of maintenance outages. they will be less and less frequent until they are a faint 'back in the day' memory. there is no risk of ludicorp financially folding over and taking our work with them. stability and service are now assured.
yahoo will make some great moves that surprise all of us. yahoo will make some bonehead moves that tick off all of us. those are both guarantees. but will yahoo destroy flickr?
no. they cant.
you will. you can.
flickr is the community. its not the technology. flickr is what happens when you get your first great comment, your first testimonial, your first invitation to join a group, the first time you start a group and your people fill it up and it thrives - flickr is what happens when your contacts become friends and your friends become your family. the technology under flickr will change in the next year - it will certainly stabilize, we may see branding and marketing issues that offend our web aesthetics and sense of cool, but those are issues we can process and harangue through - but yahoo can learn from flickr and try to earn some street cred (i remem' when yahoo was hosted on akebono.stanford) which translates into loyalty from the early adopter smart set which guide the trends that the others will follow. if they maul things here over too bad (we know how bad things can get) the community will migrate to another hot, smart responsive site. thats the nature of the game here - yahoo knows this, ludicorp knows this, you and i know this.
yahoo will now have to earn the loyalty of this community if they want their investment to work. that means listening, cajoling, being responsive, being real. Stewart and Caterina have already won our loyalty time and again - and we have earned theirs.
But we are Flickr - we give spirit to this great machine, we give energy to this collection of great personalities and photographers - and we grow and strengthen and evolve with each new member.
in my humble opinion...