Earlier in the week Bernie Goldbach and Paul Watson set me up for the mail that I too was dreading for a long time. That mail arrived on January 31st, the same day I read Bernie and Paul’s postings but for some reason I put off reading the mail until tonight. I had hoped that somehow by ignoring it until everyone else was unhappy then I would get the golden ticket, sorry Charlie, chocolate factory is closed today. 🙁
For anyone completely lost this mail was with respect to the merger of Yahoo and Flickr accounts. Yahoo bought out Flickr some time ago and now they are forcing all members to ‘avail’ of Yahoo ID’s to log into the service. Like many out there I have had a Flickr account for a long time, although only keeping a permanent stash of photos online recently, I am an “old skool” member who had to use the backdoor login for the last number of months. I’m also a paying “pro” user as I just loved the service so much, it’s one of the very few online services I have ever paid for.
Now I am being told that I can no longer login with the e-mail address I used to register. Instead I will be required to create a Yahoo ID and use that to log in. Am I annoyed? OH YES! I certainly am! As Flickr screen names are unqiue you’d think the simple solution would be Yahoo ID = screen name. Sadly Yahoo has been around for a long long time and your screen name is, well, not available, not matter who you are. Even cheesynun4fun will be disappointed. On top of this, it means that the fee for my pro account will no longer be going to great service developers but instead to the corporate blood wagon that is the parent company who will no doubt start pushing things onto my Flickr account that I really don’t want there. Oh the annoyance of it all! Well I better go register TickedOffOldSkoolMemberWithaVendetta before somebody else nabs it.