> When sites get larger, both in members and staff, the gap tends to grow between the people that build the site and the people that use it.<p>If you want to know why products slowly degrade and eventually die, that is the best answer you will ever find. Developers need to have input from real-life users in order to make the product better. Jobs was right to say that "people don't know what they want", but they surely know what bothers them about the products and services they use.
Why?<p>Flickr is one of last Yahoo products people I know sometimes still use. Facebook does a poor job at retaining high res pictures, few non-photographer friends use 500px, G+ doesn't have as much control, and Instagram is only for specific mobile photos.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like there is outsourcing of Flickr customer support to (presumably lower paid) third-party (or possibly off-shored)<p>These sentences from the post, in particular, caught my attention: "Not only do you have the patience of a saint (imagine getting asked the same 3 questions, 50 times a day, every day)"<p>" You literally can't buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can."<p>Sounds like these were Tier-1 support people (or worse, Tier 2/3 support people doing Tier-1 jobs) For a company in Yahoo's position, In-house Tier-1 support is a luxury they can't afford.<p>And, while I don't mean to sound insensitive - a well educated/technical team can come up to speed pretty quickly - within a period of a few weeks, on Tier-1 issues. You work hard to hold onto your Engineering-Support (the people that are familiar with the code base) - but the "Same 3 questions, 50 times a day" skill set can be bought/outsourced.<p>You can't help but empathize with the people being let go - it sucks to be Riffed. But, if the rumors that I'm hearing from inside Y! are accurate - this is just the first in a big string of layoff notices we'll be hearing about in the next several weeks from Sunnyvale.
I was a very active participant in the GNE [1] project created by the Ludicorp team before they went on to make Flickr and followed their progress closely for a while. They sold to Yahoo for what would probably pass as a pittance these days - I seem to recall a figure of $30m being mentioned.<p>Things didn't go so great after that. Yahoo botched it, as they have often seemed to do. It was always obvious to me that Flickr (publicly) died the day Stewart Butterfield handed in a resignation letter written in his typically eccentric style [2].<p>Stewart and some of the original GNE/Flickr team have a new project called Glitch [3] now. Not my cup of tea, but I wish them the best.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.gnespy.com/museum/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnespy.com/museum/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-resignation-letter" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-res...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.glitch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.glitch.com/</a>
Like several other people here, flickr is one of the few web services I pay for. It's hard to imagine that it's not profitable. So why does Yahoo treat it so poorly?
Flickr "added value" lies in its huge community of photographers, the forums, the favorites and the comments. I could move my shots from Flickr to any other service tomorrow but it will take a very long time to reboot the community. This is actually very sad and I hope this does not mean the beginning of the end for Flickr,
It's called a "sandwich". It's the right move to make, emotions aside.<p>Squeeze from top and bottom, and the middle goes. The middle is where you can make most improvements and cut costs in organizations. That is where most improvement is made fastest FYI.<p>It's where you start.<p>Higher and lower levels stay - while the middle layer is squeezed and improved first. Sometimes that means layoffs.
I have looked at several other photo hosting services (Smugmug, Zenfolio, 500px, etc.) and while they all do a competent job at hosting photos, it is the communities that have developed on Flickr that I would miss.<p>Yes, other sites have their own communities, but leaving one for another is like moving to a strange new town that you don't know anybody in.
I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet.<p>"Where good companies go to die" is the story of most acquisitions but Flickr still feels like it has great potential.<p>Why don't big companies figure out a "entrepreneurial outreach" program or something - stick in a good driver with a big incentive for turning around, or carve out as independent similar to Reddit in Conde?
I've been a Flickr Pro user for a number of years now, but this year I didn't renew my subscription. The reason was that I realised, I didn't need all the social crap that goes with Flickr. If I want to share photos for viewing with my friends and Family it pretty much happens on Facebook now as they don't 'get' Flickr.<p>I still needed somewhere to backup photos online however (because I'm paranoid like that), so I jumped on the SnapJoy Beta the day they announced it and I'm getting on with them quite well at the moment. It'd be nice if they had some kind of Facebook integration so I could share photos straight from SnapJoy to FB without having to upload them twice but I can live without that at the moment as long as I know my photos are safe.
flickr has added almost nothing new in about 5 years. However, I use it more than ever - with autopager it's incredible. I also wrote a greasemonkey script which replaces the default size image with the large size image on page load (and removes spaceball.gif). It's way better.<p>They should implement autopager in js and leave it on by default for the entire site - I bet total photo views would go up 50% permanently. From places where flickr is slow, this makes the site way, way more usable.<p>The community is incredible, and they have huge followings all over the world - you can easily stumble into really active nonenglish groups. I wonder if they ever realize how many people use the service.<p>Regarding keys, I once wrote a client which downloaded about 60m full size images over about 2 years for a job. All on a non-commercial key. We kept roughly within the usage limits, and they never seemed to notice.<p>The change I remember from the past few years was that they changed the photostream navigation tool on the right side of a photo - now, it remembers where you came from, and that controls which one is open by default. So if you were browsing someone's favorites, the navigator for the favorites will be open (even though you already saw that thumbnail on the previous page). In the past version, the photostream of the person's page you were on was always open no matter where you came from. Now, you are always a click away from seeing even the next photo's thumbnail. This is a bad change for me, cause I always use tabs to browse flickr anyway, and so I just came from a screen containing all the favorite thumbnails. Now, you often end up on someone's photostream, with no other of their thumbnails displayed.
I'm a pretty big Flickr user, but out of all the online services I've used, it is one of the most un-innovative. Very little has changed since I signed up for Pro 2 years ago. Given Yahoo's other problems, this is only a sign for the worse.
So not to overtly threadjack, but I built <a href="https://secure.fracken.com/" rel="nofollow">https://secure.fracken.com/</a> as a lifeline for anyone who feels the need to jump ship from Flickr - sends everything to Dropbox, first 100 photos are free, everything else is a flat USD$1/batch.<p>It's an MVP, but it works. Seemed apropos.
I subscribed to Flickr for three or four years. I think it's the only Internet service I've ever paid for. I stopped paying because I realized that 1) my friends only check Facebook anyway and 2) they did <i>nothing</i> to improve the site or tools in the years I subscribed.<p>They rewrote the Flickr Uploadr and made it into a buggy, crashing, unbelievably slow POS. It reeked of "I want to try this!" (XUL, I believe) instead of solid engineering and innovative design.