The Downfall of Flickr

Yahoo can’t catch a break. Within a week of their CEO being thrown out for lying on his résumé, Gizmodo just published an excellent detailed article chronicling Flickr’s turbulent history and continuous decline entitled How Yahoo Killed Flickr. Previously one of the most popular photo sharing services, it is quickly being left behind in the industry.

downfall of flickr

How Yahoo Killed Flickr (Gizmodo)

I personally hated having to create a Yahoo login in order to then create a Flickr login following the acquisition, Gizmodo chronicles all these decision points:

But moreover, Yahoo needed to leverage this thing that it had just bought. Yahoo wanted to make sure that every one of its registered users could instantly use Flickr without having to register for it separately. It wanted Flickr to work seamlessly with Yahoo Mail. It wanted its services to sing together in harmony, rather than in cacophonous isolation. The first step in that is to create a unified login. That’s great for Yahoo, but it didn’t do anything for Flickr, and it certainly didn’t do anything for Flickr’s (extremely vocal) users.

Marco Boerries was without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo “Connected Life” team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo. Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly.

Indeed there are now many photo sharing tools to choose from now. And I feel I must mention that our own free photography social network has been gaining speed quickly in the past year nearly reaching 40,000 active members.

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