Linknote — — 191 words

Technology

Flashback: How Yahoo killed Flickr and lost the internet

This page was published in 2013 as a flashback to an article seemingly written in 2012. It underlines just how slow and painful a death Flickr had. Reading this six years on is a fascinating reminder of just what could have been.

By 2012, Flickr was already on its knees, having suffered years of mismanagement under Yahoo. That mismanagement is picked apart in excruciating detail here. The article ends by asking, is it too late to save Flickr?

Flickr’s last best hope is that Yahoo realizes its value and decides to spin it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a final death spiral. But even if that happens, Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance. People don’t tend to come back to homes they’ve already abandoned.

Six years on, Yahoo has lurched from laughing stock to irrelevance, while Flickr has finally been sold off to SmugMug. It’s a good time to reflect on this early days of Flickr and wonder if it could ever return. But as I already noted this year, it is probably far too late.

Article — — 1,025 words

Technology

I have some thoughts on Facebook, which seems to have become a phenomenon over the past couple of months. Two or three months back it seemed to reach a tipping point. It is now no longer the preserve or procrastinating students. Now Facebook seems to have made itself the social network to be on for […]

Article — — 305 words

Information architecture — Technology

There is an interesting post at canspice.org about tagging (not to be confused with the tagging that you get with memes). Tagging already has a couple of well-known problems. One of the major ones is the confusion over whether you should use singular or plural. Flickr cleverly bypassed the other problem — words such as […]