Here’s a post from Havi Hoffman, a Yahoo employee and Flickr user. It’s cool to hear people inside Yahoo say that buying Flickr represents for them “Yahoo had getting it’s groove back”. Between this news and last weeks anouncement of Yahoo 360 (and talk of how they might smerge them together) expectations amongst users are running really high. What do you guys think? Is this a good deal for Flickr users? For Yahoo users? Will Yahoo be able to preserve what Ludicorp has created?
My Friend Flickr, Welcome to Yahoo!
My heart jumped with excitement today when I logged on and saw the news. Like other Flickr people, I’d been reading the rumors: Yahoo! might buy Flickr. As a longtime Yahoo, the possibility absolutely thrilled me. Again, we would show the Web that Yahoo! had got its groove back. I watched and waited hopefully.
You see, for the last few months I’ve been immersed in Flickr–addicted to never-ending discovery, wandering through a landscape of marvelous images from people all over the world. I was weaving my own photographic narrative into the collective tapestry, making contact with folks like me, who also take pictures of rust, rocks, leaves, watery reflections, window scenes.
On Flickr, a pattern language is evolving for visual conversations that are information-rich and unencumbered by barriers of time or space, age or language. I’m certainly not the first person to notice something out of the ordinary. Flickr creates new modes of community and inspires playful innovation, cool extensions, new application software, and ardent devotion. Wow!
The Flickr community has built an ecosystem, a meme pool of images. Flickr APIs are open and also beautiful, as Nate Koechley (another Yahoo) reminds us. Hosting millions of images from hundreds of thousands of users, the Flickr community develops and shares tools and collaborations that generate new utility, original art, inventive information remixes, and ever more user engagement.
By letting Flickr stay Flickr, this unique community can continue to flourish and feed invention across Yahoo! and the Web. Flickr can make us smarter, and help us grow and cultivate a garden of collaborative, user-driven web services. I sense the start of a beautiful friendship, as long as we never forget the incredible lightness that makes Flickr so easy to love.