Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Flickr Moves Old Skool Members to Yahoo! Sign on

Tonight I received the message below from Flickr asking me to switch over to a Yahoo! sign on:

From: FlickrHQ
Subject: Update for Old Skool members


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
So, to prove that just because I am dragging my feet on switching this blog over to the new Blogger does not mean I have issues with change, I pulled out my little-used existing Yahoo! login ID, signed onto my "old skool" Flickr account, and merged the two. No problemos, and it took me all of about 30 seconds. Woo hoo! And poking around my Flickr account with new sign on shows nothing has changed.

Thought I would post this here for nervous nellies worried about switching. It seems to go as smoothly as they claim.

What does this mean? That I trust Yahoo! more than Google (Blogger owner)? Hmmm.....

By the way, I notice that Flickr is not beta, but "gamma". Not sure what that means--they are ready to take their service out of beta, but not confident enough to call it final? And how long before it is in "omega"??

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Your post inspired me to move to the 'new' Blogger...go figure.

I notice that my RSS aggregator recaptures all of the old posts as "new" items. This explains why Library Boy had 30 posts which my RSS reader considered written today. I was feeling tremendous guilt for infrequent posting for a minute, it is now just regular guilt again.

Other than that weird RSS quirk switching is seemless.

Cheers, Shaunna

Megan said...

I'm glad that for you the process went smoothly. For others of us, it wasn't as good. In short, I'm completely locked out of my Flickr account and have no idea when I'll be able to get back in.

http://www.librarygrrrl.net/2007/01/31/335/

Connie Crosby said...

Too funny!

Yeah, I'm not overly worried about the Blogger switch. BUT....I have a number of blogs (some which show and others which don't). Plus Anh who is listed here as a co-contributor will have her other blog affected when I switch. Plus there will be the new option to load it onto our own domain, so I'm wondering if I should just do that at the same time....

Plus I want to figure out how to back up the blog before making the switch. And there are a heck of a lot of postings, some of which Blogger can no longer access for editing purposes. So I'm not sure how that is going to work. There is probably an easy answer out there.

I'm taking a website implementation course currently, so kind of wanted to learn more from that in case there are other options I might want to put into place at the same time.

But, I'm probably just over-thinking the whole thing. Wouldn't be the first time. My friend Anne tells me this is called "analysis paralysis". Heh.

Connie Crosby said...

Um, Blogger has put these comments in the wrong order. shaunna commented first, then me, and then megan. I was NOT making light of your situation, megan. I'm hoping that things get corrected quickly for you.

Cheers,
Connie

smallerdemon said...

*heh* You would trust Google less than Yahoo!? Interesting.

After watching Yahoo! do bizarre thing after thing for the last x-teen years since their inception as a standard subject based web directory to their current status as sub-standard search engine company, well... think I'm kind of done with them. (Oh hey, thanks yahoo for signing a contract with my DSL provider to pillage My Yahoo with even MORE advertising and mangle all semblance of customizing consistency with a GIGANTIC BLUE BAR AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE. And let's not forget our fun times with yahoo toolbar being bundled with every other application out there a few years ago. IT people LOVE that kind of thing.)

I've always seemed to think that Yahoo! has been constantly aspiring to be Microsoft, and largely they are succeeding in the area of "Hated for making pointless changes." arena. :)

I only ever used my Flickr account for viewing things anyway. Their free accounts were so incredibly limited as to be a useless introduction to their product. Don't get me wrong, it was a good product. Lots of great things about Flickr. Which is why Yahoo! bought them, after all. But as the wikipedia founder pointed out:

"Why are the Old Skool members being treated like second class citizens on this issue? We are the community that made Yahoo buy you guys."

Kudos to you for having SOMA FM on your sidebar. I just sent them $50 yesterday.

Connie Crosby said...

Hi smallerdemon: I find it equally amusing that you trust Yahoo less than Google! I've had similar issues with the Google toolbar. The reality is that they are probably about the same since they are largely competing one with the other. They both want to be the web Microsoft.

Glad to hear you like SOMA FM. I hope they can keep going!

Cheers,
Connie