Flickr-flaming-reeno Yahoo balls

Yahoo are fed up with my old skool ways and want me to get with the modern era - or else.

I’ve just had a message within Flickr from Yahoo telling me that I have until March 15 to merge my Flickr login with a Yahoo account.

If I decide to stick to my guns and NOT merge - a service I’ve paid for will no longer be available to me.

I’ve avoided signing up for a Yahoo account thus far because, well because I can’t think of a decent reason but I’m sure there is one.

What I don’t like is that I’m being forced to do it. What I like even less is the overly friendly message telling me so - just get to the bloody point for gods sake.

Here is the message:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th 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.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at Yahoo! Go.

95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It’s easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don’t.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, go to Merge a Flickr and Yahoo! account.

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.

Complete details and answers to most common questions are in our FAQ: Yahoo! IDs, signing in and screen names.

Thanks for your patience and understanding - and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you’re reading this, you’ve been around for a while and that means a lot to us!

Warmest regards,

- The Flickreenos

What’s an arsing Flickr bloody reeno when it’s at home - or in a dune buggy or whatever these surfy types bounce around in.

Anyway back to the subject at hand.

Apparently there are some pretty big new services coming online soon and a Yahoo account will be needed to use them - some like the mobile stuff already require a yahoo account.

So I guess I’m going to have to bite the bloody bullet and do it. I have Yahoo accounts already, I have another Flickr account specifically for band photos that’s tied to a yahoo account jersey_bands, but I don’t want to use that for my general stuff.

There are other things as well, apparently (according to Ben Metcalf) things like Tags will be limited to 75 and friends to 3000.

The friends thing doesn’t bother me because nobody likes me or my photos anyway and to be honest the tags bother me even less.

I can’t think of many photos that will require more than 75 tags to describe it meaningfully.

Plus more tags can actually make it harder to find something and eventually degrade their usefullness across the whole site.

Too many tags make a photo less destinctive - if I have a photo of Big Ben in London and you can see a couple of Sea Gulls in the picture then the best tags would be bigben, london and seagulls.

Current research (at least what I’ve been told at the Beeb) is that having too many vague tags or in fact any vague tags will make the photo harder to find.

So all in all - my complaints about this change stem from the fact that I don’t like being told what to do - I don’t want to sign up for a yahoo account so I can use flickr - so there!

Oh and I’m 25, I never wen’t to SKOOL I went to school where I learnt bugger all - it was a secondary modern comprehensive pile of turd - but at least I never found myself saying ’skool’.

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