The lack of attention being paid to Flickr, whose customer service reps appear to lack technical expertise as well as graciousness, seems like another example of Yahoo neglecting a service it bought despite that service having a large, loyal userbase. After news leaked that Yahoo planned to sunset or get rid of the social bookmarking service Delicious, fear spread that Yahoo would nix Flickr next.
Yahoo’s ultimate response to the recent Flickr drama is a good sign for fans of the service. While it was about a day late, Yahoo/Flickr did the necessary things: apologized, fixed the problem, arguably overcompensated Mr. Wilhelm, and are working on a solution to prevent the same mistake in the future. But we appreciate the reminder that the internet is not written in ink.
http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/flickr-deleting-user-accounts
“Arguably overcompensated Mr. Wilhelm”? $100 doesn’t even begin to cover 5 years with flickr, 4000 photos missing and hundreds of hours of effort preparing and uploading photos. Not to mention all the time interacting with other flickr users. F*** Yahoo. I wonder if Tumblr or Instagram will eventually emerge as the next Flickr?
Headline, flickr is clueless. flickr’s biggest problem is their perceptions of which accounts need to be deleted. The “death penalty” should be reserved for only the most extreme kinds of content. They try to make the public think that. I got deleted for street photography that was a bit different from the usual boring stuff.
Thomas, you know as well as anybody that Yahoo received a dysfunctional Flickr that never got out of “startup” mode. The ability to un-delete photos and accounts was never implemented by Stewart, Kellan, etc.
Jay, How can we believe that yahoo is not competent enough to develop and improve it? don’t you think that their strategy playing the game than the ability?
@ron, exactly, there must be more penalties defined before sentencing some one for death.
I am happy to see even the small bit of change Flicker brought forward in the last few days as the expectation level was pretty low.
As as software developer, I have to say that the fact that “undelete” was never implemented is a poor excuse.
delete flag, delete flag, delete flag. Not hard to implement, and yahoo had plenty of resources.