No Skool Like the Old Skool

Yes, I’m finally back online, well I have been for a few days now but unpacking stuff takes away from my catching up time, so imagine my surprise when a full scale mutiny is going on at Flickr… Now I’d like to think of myself as old skool flickr, I joined early summer 2004, I don’t remember exactly when, but damn, some people will seriously get their panties in a wad over the most trivial of shit.

1. In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr Better™, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.
2. On March 15th, 2007 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.

So basically it’s a few limits and a new login…

Let me say this once and once only.

Big Whoop!

Really, if you’ve more than 3,000 contacts and are tagging photos with 75 individual tags, you really need to get out more and smell the flowers you’re taking pictures of. One of the complainers has over 19,000 contacts (all marked as friends no less, I know this because I never even heard of him til today, but he’s already marked me as a “friend”) and has photos with a tag list as long as “War and Peace,” I’m unsure if thats fanatical devotion or a supreme waste of time, I think my most tagged photo has like, maybe 7 tags? And I’ve got like 170 contacts (only 40 are marked as Friends as it’s people I’ve actually interacted with in real life). So I think of myself as the average user, and these new limits don’t matter much to me, I’m not going to be all up in arms, laying awake at night in a cold sweat worrying about the going’s on of an online community. Call me old fashioned if you will.

As for the Yahoo ID, if you’ve been online for at least 5 years, chances are you have a Yahoo ID of some sort… Back in the day there was nearly no way around it. And folks, you’ve known this day was coming for over a year, so why you bitching now? I switched over once the Flickr Mobile site changed and you know what? It hasn’t changed my Flickr experience one bit, if anything it’s made it easier as my phone now remembers my Yahoo ID a lot better than the old skool cookie session id. Plus I’ve never seen the Yahoo login screen since I switched over, except when logging in on other computers that is. No complaints from me.

So this is basically a tiny proportion of the Flickr user base rattling their cages and creating a storm in a teacup, I guess they have nothing better to do?