CEO of photosharing site Zooomr, Thomas Hawk is taking Flickr to task for the changes they announced yesterday.

In his post he uses customer complaints from Flickr’s forums to make his point that Flickr has lost it’s way with these changes and they need to reconsider them. After reading through the post it seems to me like just a bunch of noise and childishness. Let’s take a look at what is actually changing here:

1. In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr Better^TM, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.

Okay.. well I could see this complaint as somewhat half valid.. there are people out there who use Flickr to promote their work professionally and they want to reach as many people as possible, putting a limit on the number of people they can have as contacts kinda does suck. But at the same time Flickr’s contact system is a lot different then say MySpace’s friends list system. Just because someone makes me a contact, doesn’t mean they have to be mine. Me personally I only make people contacts under a very small set of circumstances:

1. If I know them personally
2. If I read their blog regularly
3. If I LOVE their photo work

I think it’s a safe bet if you have upwards of 2,000 contacts that you really aren’t looking at everyone’s photos that much in depth and I also doubt you know all of these people personally. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that if you have that many contacts it’s in effort to get people to add you to their contact list as self promotion. While that’s okay it’s a little disingenious, as really, I doubt you care about them all that much and isn’t there enough shameless self promotion on the web these days? Where’s the line between it and spam really? Maybe I shouldn’t cast judgement but with their ‘Good luck with that’ comment it would seem that Flickr feels the same way. There is also a positive benefit to this, it requires people to be more mindfull of the people they add to their contact list. In the end it strengthens the community, as it requires people to consider things more heavily. Flickr also claims it will allow their systems to run better, and I can imagine that being so, having more than 3000 of anything in a database will bog things down, capping people’s contacts will almost certainly improve speed and take load off the servers. Yes it will save them money.. but they are a business, it doesn’t make their service any less awesome.

Next up: The 75 tag limit. This is also about shameless self promotion in my eyes. If you’re tagging your photos that heavily, you’re tagging them for the purpose soley of other people finding you, not for accurate results and almost definitely not for easy personal organization. Limiting tags in my eyes is also a good move for the community as it once again will require more thought put into things. And really, 75 tags? I rarely put more than 5 on something. 75 is a very high number. I doubt few people at all will be limited by this.
Oh but it seems with the exception of Mr. Hawk not many people are making a big deal over these changes, it’s more about the second change.

2. On March 15th, 2007 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.

For many this is a big change… but like it or not, those people are by far the minority. Flickr has seen such a dramatic growth in users over the last year that the ‘old skool’ users are dwarfed several times over by the newer users. There are more than a few people bitter about this move but mostly people who were skeptical about the change when Yahoo! bought Flickr. The fear, as near as I can tell is irrational. All the complaining I’m reading sounds really petty and stupid, people afraid of change. They people complaining sound to me like angsty elistist teenagers who stop liking a punk band because they signed to a major label or something. It’s stupid.

In reality… what is the big difference? The only thing this affects at all is your login and password. It does not affect people’s site address or your Flickr screenname. The change is minimal, these users will experience no difference except having to type something different at the login screen. For example: my Flickr account is linked to my Yahoo! ID of ‘reallocalcelebrity’, but my Flickr page address does not reflect that name: http://www.flickr.com/people/localcelebrity/ and at the moment I have my username as ‘reallocalcelebrity’ which does match my Yahoo! ID, but I can change this at any point if I want, it does not have to match my Yahoo! ID.

I thoroughly enjoy that many of the self proclaimed ‘old skool’ users of Flickr don’t realize this. Many of the complaints reposted on Hawk’s blog relate to the misperception that they will lose their user name or be forced to change their page address, neither of which is the case.

The other complaint is that these users will be required to have a Yahoo! ID and many feel that this will open the floodgates to them for spam and marketing emails. I kinda think this is a tad bit irrational. I have a Yahoo! ID / Yahoo! Mail account… and I pretty much don’t use it, except for Flickr. Having the account has not added any spam to any of my inboxes or in any way had any effect on anything else in my life at all. As Flickr also points out you don’t even have to use the account for your Flickr alerts email either, you can give them another account and have them notify you at that account when someone adds you as a contact of comments your photos.

So in actuality… Flickr is making you sign up for a Yahoo! ID, but they are not making you use it for anything other than a login and password.

If you’re getting worked up over this you really need to put your world into perspective. In reality, this whole thing will blow over with little to no impact on anything, maybe a few ‘Old Skool’ users will jump ship to different services but that’s really their loss more than anything. In truth Flickr’s going to work better and continue at it’s gigantic rate of growth while strengthing it’s sense of community while at same time becoming more profitable and integrated into Yahoo! But the end result is more choices and features for the end user. I’ve yet to see how this could be a bad thing.

(via Robert Scoble)

I wrote an article over at MediaRebellion!

Hell is freezing over.

When I was young I really desperately wanted to have an arcade machine in my home. I remember that actually one Christmas I took all the money my family had given me for my birthday and Christmas and invested it in a bank account solely for the purpose of saving up enough money to buy an NBA Jam arcade machine.

Well it’s years later and I still have that dream. My love for NBA Jam has come and gone but something has stayed the same. For years I have put on my Christmas list that I know I will not recieve, but do anyway: A Dodge Viper, a Ms. Pac Man arcade machine and a Guns N’ Roses Pinball machine.

Well, it’s been years and well that money… that account grew a lot, it’s actually enough money to barely cover the purchase of an arcade machine. So I’ve decided, once I’m in and settled in Chicago I’m going to honor this promise I made to myself years and years ago and buy a machine. G N’ R Pinball’s not going to happen, at least not till I’m mega rich… those machines are R A R E. However NAMCO put out something that recently caught my eye:

PAC-MAN 25th Anniversary Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga… all in one machine.

It will be mine.. oh yes, it will be mine. I think younger me would be pleased.

It seems as if Midtown, while not officially broken up, will not be preforming or recording any longer… at least not any time soon… if ever.

I think I’m going to have to suck it up soon and buy the Cobra Starship record and attempt to like it.

…and I was just about ready to accept my inner angsty hipster too.

Oh well.

No matter how BS it is or how many times I read it… this always manages to make me laugh.
Very interesting, very thorough.