Yesterday flickr changed their policies on ‘old skool’ users, that is to say the folks who signed up for the site prior to the Yahoo! takeover and requirement that you use Yahoo IDs. They also decided to place limits on the number of tags and contacts you can use – ostensibly for performance reasons. Turns out people are mighty pissed at this, and in fact I probably would be were it not that I already have a Yahoo ID from years back.
Of course the guy who is mighty pissed happens to be CEO of Zooomr.. an easily mistyped Flickr rip off that, every time I’ve visited it, is slow, badly designed and generally seems to be nowhere near as good as flickr even with these limitations. So I’m sure he’s happy and will pick up a few of the dissenters, the question is – how many old skool users, many of whom are big influencers in the online photo world, will leave now and how many accounts in general will become dormant. Time will tell.
On a related note though, I’ve been at the Always On conference the last few days – and in an interesting panel on ‘contagious web sites’ this morning discussion was made about how users are always pissed off when changes come out and, yes, you will lose a few – but the question becomes how many leave. I suspect the answer is not so many.