Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Note the photo of this Yahoo advert on the side of the bus originally read “The internet is under new management, yours” — I hacked it to make it read “The internet is under new management ours.” This is meant as parody.

Apparently Yahoo is suing Facebook. All Things Digital broke the story here. More coverage from Venturebeat.

Complaint for Patent Infringement

These are the specific patents that Yahoo is suing over according to the lawsuit document.

1. 6,907,566 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage.

2. 7,100,111 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage.

3. 7,373,599 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage

4. 7,668,861 System and method to determine the validity of an interaction on a network

5. 7,269,590 Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user

6. 7,599,935, Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected content based on another user’s authorization level

7. 7,454,509 Online playback system with community bias

8. 5983,227 Dynamic page generator

9. 7,747,648 World modeling using a relationship network with communication channels to entities

10. 7,406,501 System and method for instant messaging using an e-mail protocol

Hi Scott,

I will try to be brief (it’s not easy for me), I’ve got a lot of work to do over at Google+ today (which is where I’m spending more and more of my time) — we have a photo hangout show there tonight that I should be working on right now.

First, congratulations on your new appointment as CEO. As a long-term critic of Yahoo I wish you the best and believe every new CEO deserves a fresh chance. I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams. The Street does not like the news of your appointment, but Yahoo’s stock would have probably gone down with *ANY* CEO appointment. The Street wants Yahoo to be sold off and your appointment makes that likelihood a little more murky (why hire a CEO to come get a boatload of severance cash if you’re just going to sell the company in 2 weeks anyways — unless the CEO is being hired to actually sell the company).

I’m going to give you some advice about Yahoo. It probably won’t make a bit of difference (it didn’t for Carol).

1. Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late. Social is key. Social is winning. Facebook is social. Google is social. Twitter is social. Every great web company *must* incorporate social going forward. It’s imperative. You can start from scratch or you can try to leverage your best shot at social which is Flickr. I know Flickr is not the most profitable thing Yahoo does — and I know that profits are very important to CEO types like yourself, but trust me, forget about the immediate profitability, social IS important for your longer-term sustainability.

Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far for social on Google+ — with *NO* advertising or paid accounts. Why? Well for many reasons that have nothing to do with short-term profitability, but just assume that they can siphon off even 1% of the supposed $100 billion value of Facebook, that’s a billion dollars for spending a few hundred mil. Not a bad return. Of course they have plans to siphon off *FAR* more than just 1% and far better ways to monetize things in the longer run beyond even just the network itself.

2. It will be challenging to turn flickr into a full fledged social network. Too many people think of it as a photo sharing site. This is one of your challenges — but fix social for photographers and you’ll pull in other accounts… maybe. But the competition for social is fierce. The competition wants what little photo social Flickr has left by the way. They are siphoning it off right now as we speak. There’s a reason that Flickr’s uniques are down 20% since June (according to Compete.com). Look at this last flickr post by Ingo Meckmann. Ingo’s a great photographer by the way. This is what is happening to Flickr right now. Photographers are leaving. Google+ is siphoning off your flickr accounts and you’re losing your best social asset at Yahoo. Ingo’s move away from Flickr is just one of many, many, many such moves.

3. Flickr lacks vision and a leader. Maybe this is because most people at Yahoo don’t care about Flickr (again, it’s not the most profitable thing in the world). Maybe this is because Yahoo cannot recruit a strong leader. I don’t know. Again, this is your challenge. I’ve been on Flickr since 2004. Remember when Bradley Horowitz bought Flickr for Yahoo back in the day? Back when Stewart Butterfield ran the show there. Stewart was a bold visible leader. It helped that he was cofounder of the site and it was his baby, but he was a big personality who was out there banging the drum, interacting with the community, selling flickr to the world. Even if you didn’t always agree with his management decisions, he was at least visible.

Who is selling flickr to the world now? Nobody, that’s who. Do we even know who the General Manager of Flickr is anymore? Who is out there drumming up Flickr photo walks like Google+ is doing? Nobody. Who is out there talking about weekly Flickr innovation? Nobody.

Look at the big bold leadership of Google+. Look at Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz — the very top guys. These guys are constantly promoting their baby. They live and breath it. It’s in their blood. I had a little censorship hiccup over on Google+ the other day and within about 10 minutes of posting about it at 1am in the morning Vic Gundotra himself responded to the issue and it got fixed. Go to their Google+ accounts and look at what they are posting. Now look what your Flickr Chief is posting (sorry Markus, nothing personal). Who is rallying the troops at Flickr? Who is leading the charge?

4. You have an excellent opportunity to turn Flickr into a stock photography powerhouse and you should. Why? Well for two reasons. First off there are only two companies in the world today who can compete with Getty Images. Google and Yahoo (with Flickr). It’s a multi-billion dollar industry ripe for disruption. But secondly, if you really reformed the stock photography market you’d attract all of the best photographers in the world today to Flickr. If you came out with something fairer than a 20% Getty payout and you really put the muscle behind promoting Flickr as a stock powerhouse, you’d retain many of your top photographers who are leaving and you’d attract many more. It’s a hook, and a big hook, what social person doesn’t like being *paid* to be social? Best of all, you get a cut. How many bored housewives with cameras are sitting out there who wouldn’t want to earn a few extra hundred bucks a month? Make this dream come true not just for some of the accounts on Flickr, but open it up to literally everyone.

5. Innovate, innovate, innovate. Apparently you are a tech guy. Flickr needs circles (like Google+). You need to spend about 3 weeks studying Flickr Groups and why they are one of the stickiest social things on the web over the past 10 years. Alot about Flickr Groups need to be changed (you need more robust blocking tools, you need better ways to track threads across groups, you need to integrate group threads into your mobile experience, etc.), but at core, they are highly social little mini social systems buried deep inside of Yahoo. Figure them out. Free them. Promote them. Use them to their full potential instead of letting them languish in obscurity buried in the basement of flickr.

6. Get a flickr account yourself. I gave Carol this advice too and she never took it. Really. You are CEO of Yahoo. You *should* at least have a flickr account. It would be best if you really used it of course, but even if all it is is a puppet account that your assistant posts vacation photos to for you, do it. If you don’t support your own product, why should we? More importantly, what kind of message does it send to your employees working on Flickr if you can’t even be bothered to set up an account.

7. Overhaul community management at flickr. It’s gotten better now that Heather’s out (I finally got off the Explore blacklist that Heather always denied ever even existed), but barely. Follow Google’s lead and beef up the community management team (I think Google has like 20 community managers or something like that). Get folks in there who will interact with the community, who will promote the community, who will celebrate the community.

Look at Vic Gundotra’s last post over at Google+. What is it? It’s a post celebrating an interesting article by Trey Ratcliff, one of the photo community leaders who has emerged on Google+. How do you think it makes Trey feel when Vic Gundotra himself comes out and brings up one of his posts? How do you think it made Mike Elgan feel last night? Look at how popular a flickr account Trey has. Who at flickr is reaching out to him and making him feel as special as Vic is making him feel? Who is community management?

Vic is leading by example here. And his community managers are doing the same thing. That’s so smart. This is one of the many reasons why Google is winning at social. I hope Brian Rose and Chris Chabot and Natalie Villalobos and Michael Hermeston and Ricardo Lagos and tag team of Dave Cohen and Vincent Mo, and Tony Payne and Chew Chee and Sparky and soooooo many more Googlers got big fat year-end bonuses at Google, because they deserve it (and wayyy more Googlers that I know I left out, sorry).

Where is the community manangement at Flickr? Where is the outreach? Where is the social?

Finally, try this. Hop on the Verge’s (don’t you love cutting edge new tech sites?) article about your new appointment today, or wherever and ask the question, “what is the best internet property that Yahoo has today?” Watch how many people say Flickr. Flickr represents your best chance to funnel positive technology out of Yahoo in a highly visible way. People care more about Flickr than any other Yahoo property. It’s highly, highly visible, despite profitability issues. Let your other sleepy little businesses provide the profitability why you hold Flickr up as your beacon and proof that Yahoo can innovate. Do something bold. Get rid of the paid account. Facebook and Google+ don’t charge for accounts. I know there’s probably a big gasp there as paid accounts are probably the number one thing contributing to Flickr’s profitability at present, but do it anyways. People will love it. It will get great press. It will be a big bold move and a signal that Yahoo has much bigger plans for profitability going forward than paid Pro accounts.

That is all Scott. Best of luck. If you ever want to talk about Flickr, I have many, many more ideas on how you can turn that failing ship around. Show us you’ve got what it takes.

Poll:

Which one of these two albums looks better?

Flickr (the same view since 2004)

or

Google+ (with added infinite scrolling this week)

You know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s totally irrelevant. The Google one looks far better, but that’s so beside the point at this point.

Last night I realized for the first time that Flickr really was dead.

Where did this realization come from?

It had nothing to do with the fact that Google Photos is rolling out new innovation on a weekly basis while Flickr is still stuck in 2004. I realized it when I went to Trey Ratcliff’s photowalk at Stanford. There were over 200 people there. *200 people*! It was the largest photowalk I’ve ever been on and I’ve done dozens over the years. And what was everybody talking about at the photowalk?

Flickr?

No.

Google+?

Yes.

Not only was *everyone* talking about Google, there were tons of people from Google who were there at the walk.

Google Photos Community Manager Brian Rose was there (along with his sexy moustache). The Photo Team guy who built their lightbox Vincent Mo was there. Google+ Community Manager Natalie Villalobos was there (she used to work at Yahoo). Chris Chabot was there (and he was at Wednesday night’s photowalk in SF too). Mike Wiacek was there.

And these are just some of the people at Google that I know better than others.

There were so many more Googlers there as well. Lisa Bettany and Catherine Hall from TWIT Photos were there too.

I remember back when Flickr used to feel like this. Back when Stewart Butterfield used to show up at the SF Flickr Social meetups. Even though those were smaller meetups, they were full of the same high energy and spirit. Now the SF Flickr Group is basically dead. The meetups that used to happen every month don’t happen anymore. There are only three posts to the group in the past year and one of them is about reviving the group. I haven’t seen a Flickr employee in years. I’m still banned from their help forum for two years now — thanks alot guys.

Meanwhile I visited the Google Campus last week and got to spend an entire afternoon with an excited and engaged team who are full of energy and charged up about building the next great thing in photos.

Earlier this week, the Yahoo exec who is in charge of Flickr, Blake Irving, sent out an interesting tweet. He linked to an article that talked about the tipping point. The gist of the article was that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

While it would be easy to point to the fact that there are more photographers and photographs still on Flickr than the fledgling Google+, the fact of the matter is that the most resolved 10% have now moved on from Flickr to Google+. It will take time, maybe even a few years for the rest of them to follow, but follow they will. I’ve seen this movie before. I blogged the tipping point back in 2005 before Flickr overtook Webshots for the first time.

Webshots is still around of course, but they are entirely irrelevant at this point. Remember how excited we all were about flickr back then? Sort of like how we are about Google Photos now.

And like Flickr killed Webshots, Google+ will kill flickr.

When we look back 5 years from now at the downfall of Flickr there will probably be plenty of people to blame.

Was it simply ineffective Yahoo management? Were the execs too demoralized about underwater stock options?

Carol Bartz still doesn’t have a Flickr account. Meanwhile Sergey Brin posted shots earlier this week of some kick ass underwater photography from a trip of his to Egypt.

Was it all of the turnover, including the layoffs themselves in the flickr group and lack of any meaningful Yahoo investment?

Was it the rotating team leadership after Stewart the problem? Was it the attitude coming out of Community Management that photographers were more of a nuisance to put up with and talked down to than a community worth engaging?

Who knows.

But Flickr is very much dead in the water. It will take time to really see it happen, but they’ve lost the soul of photosharing. They’ve lost the spirit of photosharing — the zest and passion and love — and while they got away with that for a long time due to lack of competition, things have now changed with Google Photos arriving on the scene, and to a degree 500px as well.

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of haters responding to this post. Flickr is still beloved by so many of us. Myself included. I still upload photos up there every single day. Don’t hate me for sharing this opinion. And don’t bash Google Photos for whatever features you think they lack compared to flickr — but, but, but, Google+ doesn’t have groups, blah, blah, blah.

All that’s coming.

As I mentioned before, it’s not about the features, it’s about the spirit. And with weekly innovation on their invite only beta product, Google+ is far more likely to get the final product right than Flickr is to innovate at this point.

Please keep in mind that this is just my personal observation after watching the photo sharing space very closely over a long period of years. I very well could be wrong.

Mark Twain’s famous quote “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” in fact comes to mind.

Update: This post was on hacker news this morning and as such is getting a lot of traffic.

The comments on this post on Google+ itself are also worth reading.

Update #2: Peter Adams got a great group photo from last night. He was shooting with a Phase One system which is pretty awesome. Check out his group photo here — be sure to actually click on the photo to see it huge in the lightbox view.

Update #3: My Google+ invite link ran out of invites above, but Mike Wiacek sent me his invite link which should be reloaded with another 143 or so if people still need them, just click here.

Update #4: Looks like Mike and I are both out of invites now. David Miller just emailed me his invite link. You should be able to get one here if you still need one until they run out.

Update #5: TechCrunch picks up on the Flickr story here. Looks like we’re out of invites again. Instead of me posting more links in the body of this post, if you have an invite link and want to share it, post it in the comments and people can use them there if they still need an invite to sign up.

If you want to see if you have any testimonials at flickr waiting to be approved click here.

The screenshot above is of testimonials that I’ve written for people on flickr that have never been approved. These are photographers on the site whose work I actually liked enough to take valuable time out of my day and sit down and thoughtfully put together a short write up on why I valued them and their art on the site.

Some of these were written by me months ago. Some, in fact, years ago.

Unfortunately many of these will never be approved and were a complete waste of time on my part.

The reason why they’ll never be approved is the same reason why others that I’ve written have taken months and even years to be approved — because Flickr has no notification process in place for when someone writes you a testimonial.

Unlike someone’s Facebook Wall or 500px Wall, at Flickr, when you write something nice about someone on their main profile page, the only possible way that they’ll ever know about it (in order to approve it) is to actually go to the “Manage Your Testimonials” page buried three levels deep inside Flickr.

Because many users don’t know about this page, thousands (if not tens of thousands) of testimonials have been written on Flickr that never are published.

As a user of the site, knowing that there is a chance that my testimonial won’t be seen, it discourages me from wanting to write more of them. If I’ve wasted my time in the past, and the user won’t even find out about it anyways, why even write one?

Testimonials are some of the most powerful ways for people to communicate on a social network. They are generally more meaningful than a mere comment on a photo and are much more thoughtful as well. They are not just a comment on a specific photo, they are a comment on something bigger, you as a photographer.

The fact that Flickr has left testimonial notification broken for this many years makes me feel like they are simply just clueless about how social networks ought to work. It’s an epic fail and even worse when the way to fix it is so easy.

To fix testimonials flickr just has to do two things.

1. When someone writes someone a testimonial, forward a flickr mail to that person automatically from the system. They already have a mechanism to do this for other things on the site, why not testimonials?

2. When someone writes someone a testimonial, put this action in the recent activity page. This is the most viewed page on Flickr and will likely be seen by them.

By doing these two super easy things Flickr could double or triple the amount of testimonials written on the site. More testimonials = more page views. More testimonials means more people feel good about themselves and the site.

Or maybe it would be better if I just put this in a language that the Yahoos at Yahoo can actually understand. (More testimonials = more page views = more ad$$$vertising impressions) + (more testimonials = more people feeling good about themselves on the site = more Pro acc$$$ounts) = $$$.

Did I mention $$$?

This is such a no brainer. Instead of working on things like the boring old log off page (Zzzzzzzzzz….) that flickr redesigned last week, they should be fixing things that matter like this.

Flickr Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg has announced on his Twitter account that he will be leaving Flickr. From Rothenberg: “Here goes: after 5 years, I will be stepping away from Flickr. Will miss working with such a talented, hard-working, and hard-drinking team.” Rothenberg added in a follow up tweet that he knows what he is doing next but not announcing it just yet.

Since the departure of Flickr Co-Founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, there have now been three different managers of the Flickr product at Yahoo. Kakul Srivastava who took over the job when Butterfield resigned, Douglas Alexander who took over for Srivastava and then Rothenberg.

On his LinkedIn page, Rothenberg described his role at Flickr as being “somewhat akin to piloting a rocket-powered banana-delivery truck* at 20,000mph through a dense forest filled with dangerous and hungry apes. (*p.s. that truck is also on fire.)”

Recently Rothenberg posted a screenshot showing that over the past six months Flickr has been growing under his management, however, Flickr has also come under fire in various press reports recently for failing to keep pace with photo sharing at Facebook. This past weekend Flickr also received criticism for censoring a popular Egyptian Blogger’s photos of Egyptian Secret Police.

I’ve not seen any word yet on who will be taking over the reins at Flickr with Rothenberg’s departure, although Yahoo did last month hire Hotmail Veteran Steve Douty to oversee the Flickr property, among other things, as the Vice President of Communications and Communities.

Update: TechCrunch has an official statement from Yahoo on Rothenberg’s departure:

Spiering’s profile is on Flickr here.

Update #2: Rothenberg has written a blog post about leaving flickr.

Update #3: Rothenberg blogs now that he is headed to bit.ly as the new head of product there. Ironically, bit.ly is one of the url shorteners that is blacklisted on Flickr’s site.

Dear Ms. Bartz:

It’s been a few months since I last posted a letter to you. I wanted to take this moment though to check back in with you on Flickr. In my last letter I suggested that Yahoo was not giving Flickr the attention that it deserved. Since that last letter there were a couple of nicely orchestrated shout outs to Flickr. Blake Irving did his Hell yes we love Flickr tweet. He made a stop by the FlickrHQ offices complete with a silly “milking margarita’s” photo op, etc.

Blake’s a pretty senior guy at Yahoo and so at least it *feels* like Flickr’s not being totally and completely ignored anymore, at least a little bit.

Also since my last letter to you, Flickr “accidently” deleted a guy’s account. Flickr was able to restore his account in the end (after a lot of bad press at places like CNN) but even more importantly announced that they are actually working on a tool to undelete bad account deletions in the future (finally! yeah!).

These are both really positive things, even if they came about the hard way.

However, what is really blowing my mind this morning is seeing how badly Flickr handled the censorship of these Egyptian secret police photos over the weekend. Granted, not everyone is probably working on Flickr on the weekend, but really Carol, they screwed the pooch this time.

You have a reputation as a savvy well regarded businessperson Ms. Bartz. Business is your thing. You’re all business. So as a businessperson let me ask you this. What is the value of the photo above that went viral for your competitor Facebook?

I mean this photo was seen all over the internet. You couldn’t miss it if you were online. It was EVERYWHERE. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in PR value? Maybe millions? You guys reportedly spent $100 million last year on your “the internet is under new management yours” campaign right? You understand the value of PR I think. I think we can both agree with the statement that the viral photograph above (and others like it) were worth a hella lot of money in PR value for Facebook.

Aligning a social media business like flickr with popular pro-democracy bloggers to me is an absolute no brainer from a business perspective. It is just the smart thing to do if you are trying to attract one of the most active viral groups of people on the web today.

So while your competitor Google actually has one of their employees on the ground in the fight for democracy in Egypt (another PR win), what is Flickr doing? They are CENSORING photos by a popular Egyptian blogger, Hossam Hamalawy, aka Arabawy — a young rising leader in the Egyptian revolution.

This man is a hero Carol. He is on the ground in one of the hottest spots for news on the planet — he has a huge following on Twitter, and is very well regarded. And what are the photos that flickr is censoring of his? Photos of Egyptian Secret police officers suspected of TORTURE.

So Flickr has an opportunity to try and embrace social media and what is going on with revolution in the Middle East or they can support a dying regime’s alleged torturers.

And what side does Flickr choose?

Let’s forget about what is right or wrong here for a second. Yahoo took it pretty hard on the chin a few years back when you turned over a Chinese dissident’s email to the Chinese Govt resulting in his imprisonment. Jerry Yang was called before Congress and browbeaten (another bad PR moment for Yahoo). Surely Yahoo can see that siding with the bad guys here is just simply a bad business decision from a PR perspective. Right?

It gets worse Carol. In order to justify censoring these photos, Flickr did it by citing a frequently ignored provision in their community guidelines. The provision that says the work in your flickrstream has to be “your own work.” They bounced his secret police photos on a stupid technicality of a rule that is largely ignored by everyone on Flickr anyways.

Everybody on Flickr knows that Flickr is *chock full* of photos that are not a user’s “own work.” Even your own Flickr staffers photostreams are full of images that are not technically “their own work.”

For example — Matthew Rothenberg, who runs flickr for you, has this photo of a masturbating dinosaur in his photostream that was taken by your former Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ (according to the tags on his photo). This is not “his own work,” the exact same provision that flickr used to censor Arabawy.

Forget for a second that from a customer service perspective an “award” like this might be insulting (apparently it’s given for “excellence in the field of community abuse and advocacy”) the photo clearly is not Rothenberg’s “own work.” Trust me Ms. Bartz, hypocrisy is never a good thing when justifying something like this.

There are other images in Rothenberg’s photostream that are not “his own work,” too and he’s not alone. Other flickr staffers have posted photos in their photostreams that are not “their own work.” I’m not picking on Rothenberg here, he just happens to be the guy who runs the place so he’s the best example.

From a PR and business perspective, your competitors are gaining incredible PR value from the revolution in the Middle East. Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of them. Flickr should be included in that list. They are a natural fit. Instead Flickr makes an incredibly stupid public statement retweeted all over the world by influential folks like NPR’s Andy Carvin or Clay Shirky.

This just makes no possible rational sense. Any thinking rational businessperson should see the value of being positively associated with young pro-democracy forces in Egypt in social media today.

I hope you read this letter. I also hope you go back to Flickr and have them undo this mistake and repost Arabawy’s photos. It’s sort of too late now as Anonymous has already helped him (and the Egyptian people) out and reposted all of the photos in an uncensorable location here (the right thing and a no-brainer positive PR act for Anonymous) — but at least Flickr would be making a statement that they made a mistake here. It is in both Yahoo and Flickr’s interest to look like an active engaged social media company, not some tired old asleep at the switch has been.

I also hope that you would also take a hard look at the institutional culture at Flickr. A culture that thinks publicly posting a photo of a masturbating dinosaur award for community abuse is funny, yet blows a major PR opportunity by abusing totally the wrong customer is not the right culture for an engaged social media company going forward.

Yahoo and Flickr can and should do better than this.

(Editor’s note: this article is parody, as in total parody, as in I made all this up and as in parody is protected speech under the First Amendment).

In a surprise leak from today’s Yahoo/Goldman Sachs conference call, an updated slide showing additional sites Yahoo plans to shutter in the weeks ahead included today’s newly announced “LiveStand” service.

When pressed by analysts as to why “LiveStand” was listed under the “sunsetting” column on the Yahoo slide when it was simultaneously being announced as a new Yahoo product just today, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving put it bluntly:

“Look,” said Irving, wearing a velvet purple blazer,”we can spend a couple of mil trying to build some stupid magazine subscription thing that nobody will ever use over the next year, or we can just nip it in the bud now and save our shareholders a boatload of money,” Just imagine if we’d killed Yahoo Buzz 8 months earlier, he added. This makes more sense than even switching your auto insurance to GEICO.

My job here is all about maximizing shareholder value and by God, the last thing I’m going to do is waste a bunch a good Yahoo money on some stupid idea just because Jerry Yang and Terry Semmel say I should. I figure that if we can save three mil by sunsetting this puppy early that’s another 2 mil each for Carol and I.

Irving said that he planned to amortize the savings now, in time for executive bonuses, but wouldn’t actually be laying unit employees off until shortly before Christmas. “Trust me,” he added with a sinister laugh as he sipped his Red Bull, “it will be better that way.”

When asked where Yahoo would actually get new revenue Irving replied, “Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.” Irving then went on to tell a story about his recent visit to Flickr HQ where he showed Flickr Staff how to milk a margarita. I love those guys he added. Can’t stand all those pesky photographers who use the site, but those guys in the main office are just swell. Irving went on to talk about the newly enhanced version of Flickr for the new Windows phone. “Trust me,” added Irving, “six or eight months from now when everyone’s ditched their iPhones and Android phones for these killer new Microsoft phones, we’ll look like geniuses. Irving then pulled out a new prototype Windows based phone called “The Chumby” from his blazer and gave a personal demonstration on how cool Flickr looked on a Microsoft phone. This phone is PHAAAAATTTTTTTT crowed Irving.

Towards the end of his presentation Irving added an important disclaimer, “all of this ‘sunsetting’ stuff is just between us girls. If I find out anyone here leaks these slides I’ll have their nuts on a platter for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Got it! And nobody better’d breathe a word of this to Carol either he added, she’s going to be demoing the new service next week at Mobile World Congress and we’ve already booked John Stewart and Serena Williams to come out and hype this thing for us. Carol will look like an idiot if she knows I’d already planned this. And we can’t have Carol looking like an idiot.”

Louis Gray is reporting that Yahoo has hired former Hot Mail Veteran Steve Douty to, among other things, oversee Flickr. Douty reports into “Bill Shaughnessy, the company’s senior VP of global product management, who in turn reports to Blake Irving, Yahoo!’s chief product officer, Douty is responsible for product strategy and roadmap to rollout for the products’ current offerings and their future plans, including how they would be monetized,” reports Louis.

Wow, that’s a pretty important job and means that Douty will likely have a great deal of influence over what our “Flickr World” looks like in the months ahead.

Welcome aboard Steve and I hope you are able to accomplish great things with our beloved Flickr.

A few hours ago, Yahoo EVP and product Chief Blake Irving sent out a tweet on his Twitter account likely in response to recent questions about Yahoo’s commitment to Flickr. The tweet seems to be a ringing endorsement, at least from Irving, that Yahoo Management *does* in fact value what they have in Flickr.

“Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.” wrote Irving.

It’s nice to finally see someone from the senior Yahoo ranks actually come out and utter the word Flickr. For a while there I was starting to wonder if they even knew they owned it. Flickr has been conspicuously absent from Yahoo analyst earnings calls and other PR opportunities by Yahoo Management and was starting to feel like some sort of neglected orphan. Layoffs at Flickr last month were at about 8% (about twice the overall 4% Yahoo rate that most press cited). Irving’s statement today at least shows that Yahoo gets that it’s important to show Flickr a little love from time to time.

Now, next, how the hell do we get Irving and his boss Carol Bartz to actually sign up for Flickr and open accounts of their own? You know you’re just chomping at the bit to see the latest snapshots from these two Yahoos.

Thanks Danny for tweeting the Search Engine Land Article!

Update: More from ReadWriteWeb here.

Update #2: Apparently Blake Irving actually does have a flickr account. It doesn’t look like he’s updated it though since August of last year. You’d think his assistant could be more on top of that for him. From the two photos of him that are tagged on Flickr, it looks like he actually visited Flickr HQ July of last year once.

the Delicious team will soon be working in close proximity to their fraternal twin, Flickr. And just like we’ve done with Flickr, we plan to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.

- Yahoo blog post announcing their acquisition of social bookmarking site delicious. December 2005.

It was leaked today that Yahoo would be shutting down, er I mean “sunsetting” the popular bookmarking site delicious. Yahoo Products Chief Blake Irving threatened to fire whoever leaked the news on Twitter (way to go Blake, threatening to fire someone on Twitter = classy move). I thought I’d take a moment to go back and review the original announcement that Yahoo made when they acquired Delicious in the first place:

Great Tastes That Go Great Together

I’ve been a big fan of Delicious, the social bookmarking service Joshua Schachter created, for quite a while now. So much so that when Dave Taylor recently asked for “experts” to help explain What’s so cool about Delicious?, I was glad to masquerade as an expert.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search