Oh in my earlier ranting, I forgot to mention, go on to the 50 million missing page at Flickr if you don't mind having to go through the process of logging in using your Yahoo id. Its a neat way to share your empathy with and register your protest against this human injustice.

12:41:43 PM    comment []  trackback []

I got a pointer to this Flickr Group .."About 50 million missing (photos only of Indian women and girls)" from Peter this morning, and when I went to Flickr, I was asked to sign in using my Yahoo ID. That's a huge pain. I have many different Yahoo IDs and most are defunct. Ever since I started using Skype and Gmail, Yahoo IM has taken a real backseat. Because I love Flickr, I forced myself to get a new ID .. and I found dina.mehta available and grabbed it.

Still, it is a real pain when such things happen. It makes me really concerned about issues around privacy too. I know many Yahoo users hide behind aliases, I have a few too! Am sure there would be hesitation in publicly proclaiming them, by attaching them to Flickr Accounts. So many, like me, for different reasons, would need to get a new Yahoo ID. How does that help ME as a user? How does it make my user experience any better? How does it make my life any better? Its just as stupid as someone saying they want to own all of you.

I had a similar experience when I wanted to blog at the Worldwidehelp group blog on Blogger when the recent earthquake in Sumatera, Indonesia occurred - I was asked to log in using my Gmail account instead of the old Blogger default, and then found I was unable to post at the blog. I pinged Bala and Ange .. and finally discovered that it works intermittently, after many tries.

I looked through my much under-used newsreader for others' views on this and found this gem of a post from Suw Charman, who so succinctly spells out all the issues around this. Now Suw got a letter from them .. which for some reason I didn't or missed entirely. And although I'm not a heavy Flickr user, I do go there off and on, and have never seen the notice from Yahoo to switch to Yahoo IDs as login. Thats really poor design, poor customer management, and it upsets me as a user. When I got onto Flickr and bought myself a FlickrPro account .. I signed up for Flickr and not Yahoo. I don't want to give Yahoo more access to me - it violates my privacy.

They have created dissonance in my mind now, and my perception of Flickr as a youthful, agile example of a Web 2.0 site that got it right has gone in an instant. It is soooo old skool. While I may even like the concept of having one login for everything, give ME that choice - don't force it on me.

So Yahoo and Google owns all of us now. One more corporate crack at the vision of a seamless semantic web. We know well enough what happens once a brand starts evoking negative perceptions - users can be an unforgiving lot!

12:35:47 PM    comment []  trackback []