Wired News has picked up on the massive "user revolt" over Flickr's new video features.
The quick version of it: "Pro" users (like me) that pay $25/year to host tons of our photos, some of whom are quite serious photographers...don't care that much about video, and are angry that Yahoo just "threw it out there" without any beta, user feedback, or even...a market for it. Quoth one angry Flickr-er:
Quite rightly, Underwired (that's Wired's oh-so-clever Blog name) points out that the new feature takes away from Flickr's purpose - photography.The big issue is the way it was implemented," said Jason Bouwmeester, a systems analyst in Canada and one of the group administrators for No Video on Flickr. "There was no public beta.... They just reset everyone's settings."
How does this tie into government (and why the heck would I, you might ask)?
Well, a complaint about lawmakers is that they like to make big sweeping things happen with bills and leave details up to the regulatory agencies (think 1996 Communications Act and the FCC) that bog down the implementation with tons of nitpicking, minutiae and...whatever else makes up the Code of Federal Regulations.
Of course, there's always the tie-in about how the $25 user fees were spent implementing dumb 90 second videos and not...making Flickr better.
I hope people complain as loud when their taxes get raised and their roads don't get fixed. Yahoo should take a lesson from good business and good government, and give the Flickr "taxpayers" a ROI instead of stuff they don't need."I had hoped my [Pro membership fee] would go to fixing issues with the site, not to starting a video application," said Bouwmeester. "I can't see them reverting [the video service] altogether, but they should have some way for users to ignore it."
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