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.

Having been a paying member of Flickr for longer than many people, I enjoy the fact that my login name is the same login that I use for most sites. Apparently, that advantage is now being taken away from me due to Yahoo's purchase of Flickr.

You know, I have a Yahoo account, but it's an ugly, ugly screen name. When Flickr introduced custom photosite URLs back in the day, they made a mistake by letting people register URLs that were being used by other people as screen names. Why would I not want my screen name as my URL? There should have been some way to automatically reserve these, because some dude who doesn't even use his Flickr account is using the URL at my screen name. And now here I am getting screwed out of my screen name again.

And for what? Nothing. Flickr hasn't added a feature in a year, as has been useful to me. The fancy little new menus don't do much for me to rave about that a real upgraded desktop Uploadr would. But how old is that piece of crap software? It doesn't even re-orient photos as well as my poor shipped-with-XP tools do, and that's sad. You can't tag before you upload, or assign photos to batches before you upload unless all of the photos are the same. What a crappy application.

Flickr was the poster child of the Web 2.0 interface with its snazzy edit-in-place captions and descriptions. What happened to the innovation after that? Apparently, they sold it to Yahoo and Yahoo burned it.

I've heard a million stories about how Yahoo locked someone out of their account, thus barring them from their own photos on Flickr forever. Yahoo "support" is completly unavailable or unable to help any of them. This may be the kind of thing that you do with a throwaway email address like fluffin4tor@yahoo.com, but is not the kind of thing that you do to photos of people and their families and their priceless vacation photos. People trusted you with that stuff, Flickr. You were safe, but Yahoo is not, and now you have sold trustworthiness off.

Plus, "migrating" (which is totally the wrong word) my ID doesn't enhance my available services. The only reason I have a Yahoo ID in the first place is to get API keys for their REST developer services. I use it for nothing else. What benefit does forcing me to switch my ID offer me? None. You could have at least given me a cookie.

Well, fine. It's too late for me now to do anything but assent to this. I'll link my crappy Yahoo ID to your service. But as soon as the next Flickr service rises (which will have as it's best first feature -- a "Flickr Importr"), I'm outta here.

And we weren't supposed to worry that Flickr was selling out.