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The Flickrization of Yahoo

posted by Scott Beale on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
Flickr

Erick Schonfeld wrote a great article for the current issue of Business 2.0 on how Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr has been causing a shift in the corporate culture of Yahoo: “The Flickrization of Yahoo”

Eric talks about how Yahoo is moving toward people and community, while Google is focused on science and machines.

The Flickrizers’ most ambitious goal is to turn Web searching itself into a social event — the idea being that you can find what you’re looking for faster if you first see pages saved and tagged by people you know and trust. Done well, it could play as the triumph of the humans over Google’s cold mechanical approach.

This is an especially attractive idea to Yahoo veterans, since it harks back to the vision Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo had in their Stanford University dorm rooms: Categorize the Web and recommend the best sites for its users, using human editors. That vision had to be abandoned when the Web got too large. But this time the users and the editors will be one and the same, there will be enough to tackle the entire Internet — and Yahoo won’t have to pay them.

The Yahoo aquistion of Flickr has lead to the more recent purchases of Upcoming.org and del.icio.us. I’m sure 2006 will see even more change at Yahoo as it evolves from it’s old Web 1.0 ways.

photo credit: Scott Beale (from the Flickr Fiesta)
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filed under: Flickr, Google

this blog post was written by Scott Beale on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005


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Viewing 5 Comments

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    So now it's Google bad, Yahoo good? I need to update my bumper stickers -- they're all from the Microsoft bad, Google good era. But, of course, that was half a year ago...
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    I'm stillin the Yahoo! Sucks camp myself. Their lack of any remotely proper support for their services, their nasty toolbar's inclusion into Acrobat Reader, and their forece Yahooinization of SBC DSL customers are just a few of the missteps that all add up to avoiding yahoo as much as possible for me. Not to mention the unbelievable arrogance and tunnel vision of their engineering/programming staff in various blogs really leaves me with a unpleasant aftertaste when I look back on some of the great innovations they initialized.

    I am wondering how long before they buy MySpace, since MySpace's design is atrocious but it's got "community" going for it. It seems like they would make a great match.
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    Can't complain about yahoo's tech support, it's free after all.
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    I just thought that the pre Wired days of Man versus Technology was over. The tools of blogs + google is a combination that has revealed tons of government and corporate secrets to the people. To hear google villified as a "cold mechanistic approach" dismisses so much of what we've accomplished with brute force tools like google. Google equals knowledge, and blogs equal analysis. We've never lived in such a transparent age.

    None of this should take away from Yahoo, it's a fine set of tools. But I don't want any thinking liberal to shy away from wonderfully powerful technology like google. We need it to see what others would love to hide.
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    Ah, well, yes, Yahoo! support is free, but I pay for my SBC DSL, and the intermixed Yahoo/SBC can often lead to support weirdness that I don't care for. My Yahoo and SCB boxes are all combined now, which is NOT something I am happy about or ever wanted. SBC DSL customers who pay for their service also must have a very different looking My Yahoo! page than non-paying regular customers. All of the SCB/DSL stuff is now shoved to the top of the page and by SBC and Yahoo!'s own admission, can not be altered (so much for customizing you My Yahoo! page).

    The rampant inclusion of the Yahoo! Toolbar creeping into unpredictable ares of download is another thing I mentioned but I feel worth mentioning again simply because that it's only one step away from those spyware products that you agree to use when you agree to use a "free" piece of software.

    I'm not trying to be necessarily anti-yahoo here, as I do remember them from WAY back and I still use it for various things, but a few of the things they have done stand out as examples of very poor consideration of their actual users that they really crept over from the "kind of ok but I can put up with this part of it" camp to the "ok, now this sucks" camp.

    Community is fine, and I applaud that part of their new approach, but everything yahoo has touched that once was good somehow becomes a part of their "Oh, let's slowly roll this product into this other one and not let anyone opt out and enjoy or develop the stand alone product anymore." is awfully Microsoftian in nature.
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