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Flickr responds to 'Dear Marissa Mayer' appeal with an appeal of its own

Jul 20, 2012 at 00:12:35 GMT

OTHER NEWS FLICKR IMAGE-SHARING YAHOO

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When Marissa Mayer was named new CEO of Yahoo recently, Los Angeles-based journalist Sean Bonner posted an appeal for her to 'please make flickr awesome again', signing it 'the Internet'. On his blog, Bonner commented that Flickr, was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, needs someone to 'put some support behind it, bring it up to date, give it an actually functional mobile app and commit to keeping it alive'.

Sean Bonner's appeal to new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to 'please make Flickr awesome again' has been tweeted more than 20,000 times since he posted it on July 17th.

Claiming that 'it’s no secret that everyone blames Yahoo! for killing Flickr' Bonner created the appeal in the hope that '[Meyer] could be the one to breath life back into it'. His appeal went viral, and today Flickr - which by its own account hosts more than five billion digital images - posted a response, copying the style of Bonner's original open letter.

Addressed 'dear Internet', Flickr's reply invites users to 'come help us make Flickr awesomer' and contains a link to flickr.com/jobs where interested potential applicants can find details of several open positions.

Flickr's tongue-in-cheek response to Bonner's appeal asks for help to 'make flickr awesomer' and provides a link to open positions at the photo-sharing site.

Although it still has a massive user-base, Flickr has been challenged in recent years by a new wave of competitors including social networking sites like Facebook, which offer increasingly advanced photography-oriented features, and dedicated sharing apps such as Instagram (now also owned by Facebook).

Are you a Flickr user? Are you satisfied, or do you think it needs to be made 'more awesome'? Or have you turned away from Flickr altogether, in favour of other photo-sharing sites? Let us know.

(Via wired.com)

Comments

Total comments: 156

Flickr is great for people who care about photographs just slightly more than those who limit their posting to facebook. Unfortunately that type of photographer far outnumbers the enthusiast and professional photographers that find Flickr underwhelming for their needs. So I just don't see a whole lot changing at Flickr unless they add a higher tier of membership that is targeted specifically for pros and high end enthusiasts.

2 upvotes

Flicker was never awesome. A horrible interface to navigate through photos.

Yahoo is a sinking ship which will soon join the ranks of AOL and myspace soon to be followed by groupon.

9 upvotes

I can't wait to see what Mayer has in store for Yahoo! & Flickr. They really do need a minimalist redesign and modern apps.

0 upvotes

As a long time Flickr Pro account user, I think a major overhaul is needed. The UI is awful by today's standards. It's so, umm...Yahoo! Nothing will change unless they let loose some creative people, including photogs to work on the site. And mobile? It's 2012 and still no official mobile apps?

And please don't say Flickr UI is great by comparing it to the even worse Facebook experience! Facebook's afterthought, hacked together, forever Beta photo handling is just plain bad.

Just look at the clean, modern look of 500px. Flickr needs to do better, but somehow I doubt that Yahoo's new CEO will throw resources at Flickr.

5 upvotes

What are you on about? An official flickr iOS app has been out there since late 2009. And it's pretty good. The website is also fully mobile optimised on Safari and Chrome for iOS.

http://www.flickr.com/mobile/

Check your facts first maybe?

What is so awful about the UI? It's simple but incredibly effective and fast. The resizing algorithm and slideshow presentation is the best I have seen.

1 upvote

I'm on flickr and, while I would like to be able to for instance alter more easily the order in which pictures are displayed and to get rid of the absurd "date taken" nonsense on pictures scanned from negatives or xpcies, I am mostly happy with it. Then again, I think that Facebook and its ilk are for nonserious people.

2 upvotes

I'm still on flickr, though perhaps just barely by virtue of inertia -- it's some considerable work to move.

Flickr has serious problems from my POV: the lack of sets in favorites and groups makes these central features considerably less useful than they otherwise could be. That specific lack makes groups into randomized heaps of images instead of curated collections of thematic interest. Flickr's home page at the user level is simplistic, dated, and largely inflexible.

Been thinking about saving the $25/year and just moving my content to my own website -- you lose the social aspect of it, but at least I'd be able to arrange content in some rational fashion, not to mention control the presentation and remove the size and time limits.

3 upvotes

I am all for them improving the site. I am a long time user and think they still do many things well.

Dan

1 upvote

They have a huge existing base of users. Why in the world would they NOT want to make it better and gain even more users? They need to...or it may well die off.

2 upvotes

Flickr is great. It's photo sharing that isn't cluttered by all the crud that is on facebook.

Flickr doesn't need any radical changes, just needs some TLC to tweak some things like being able to customize how the photostream looks and all that.

6 upvotes

I agree. With the new "liquid display" (photos as large as monitor allows), Flickr has taken a big step forward. The new feature should, however, also apply to all the old pics, not just the newly uploaded.

0 upvotes

In addition to the 'liquid display' they listened to us and offered the alternative feature of leaving photos up to 1024 x768 uploaded to be UNTOUCHED and not *stretched* as they were doing and which Google+ also tried for awhile, stretching -after- downsizing even. Both went back to leaving up to 1024 as-is so that the original detail comes thru'. Facebook's renditions don't retain the original detail, so I can't imagine why photogs would be happy with it as main display place.

I love flickriver.com ... try it. Also click on Users, to see your 'interesting' or 'sets' streamed one after another w/ no long loading time and against black and choose 'large' (or more) on the top left.

Also try 'Archived' -- if you leave Exif data when uploading you'll see your pics by year, month, day and in calendar format, with one pic representing each day you shot, and then a click will bring up all the photos you shot that day.

You can search all your photos by words in captions, tites or tags.

Comment edited 48 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

I use 3 hosting sites: PBase for simple, clean display at original size when wanted, flickr, and google+ (which improved on the horribly compressed picasaweb photo displays, the latter improving their display algorithms this week I noticed - no longer first downsizing each photo and then stretching it to desktop size).

Here's an example of the downside of Flickr and Google+'s two-wk experiments with 'liquid display' in which they adjusted everything
http://www.pbase.com/andrys/image/144232686

Flickr was the first to fix the problem, responding to users in a forum and giving a user the credit for the final decision. Google fixed theirs a wk later, w/o saying anything. I'm keeping up the sample so I can check on whether Google+ went back to the awful compression they had been doing.

I give flickr a lot of credit for talking in detail publicly w/ the users and deciding to no longer compress & then enlarge our medium-to-large images when displaying them on large monitors.

Comment edited 3 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

I wouldn't mind it getting more awesome. I have gone to other sites like 500px.com and pixoto.com. As well as many other mobile communities via my iphone.

CWDaly

2 upvotes

500px is sexy but it lacks much of what Flickr offers for viewing or sharing photos. And I get far fewer views on 500px. Sexy is nice, but functionality trumps. Flickr just needs a facelift and to build on its already strong set of features.

5 upvotes

I still very much like Flickr. It's simple, robust, and dependable. Their resize engine is top notch, the community is large and active, and while it's not as showy as some of the others, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.

8 upvotes

Total comments: 156


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