billpalmer.net

This past weekend at PodCamp NYC someone asked me if I was using Flickr. My answer was "I used to."

Shortly after I was first initiated into new media back at PodCamp Boston 1.0, I began uploading every photo to Flickr from every event I attended. But then I hit that pesky 200 photo limit, where my older photos would become inaccessible as I uploaded newer ones, and I felt just a bit scammed by the fact that Flickr never made clear to me that this would happen when I signed up. Although the dollar amount they wanted for unlimited photo uploading was very low, and I've paid more money for premium accounts on other social networks when warranted, it just didn't feel right and I put it off for so long that eventually I forgot about Flickr completely.

These days I upload iProng Magazine's event photos to Facebook, cross-link to it from Twitter and my blog, mention it in the latest magazine issue, and call it a day. But the question I was asked at PodCamp did get me thinking that I may have erred too far on the side of the principle of the thing instead of settling for practicality. So when someone on Twitter asked me today if I was going to make the photos available on a non-Facebook platform, I decided to go ahead and give Flickr another try. I'd start uploading new event photos, and if they ended up adding something to the equation that Facebook didn't, then I'd happily pay their little monthly fee.

Then I tried to log into Flickr. What the heck did they do? I vaguely recall hearing that Flickr had been acquired by Yahoo, but such things usually mean little from an end-user standpoint, beyond the fact that they're now stable enough not to go out of business and maybe even won't have to charge for their most basic features. Yahoo does have a particularly disturbing track record of acquiring promising companies, doing nothing positive with them, and letting them wither before finally shutting them down and writing them off, but that's another story for another day. All I was going to do was log in and upload a few photos.

So I logged in an I was treated to a seemingly simple question, but one that I clearly managed to answer incorrectly: did I want to merge my Flickr account with my Yahoo account? Not really, but if that was the easiest way to get things done, to get past the login nonsense and get to the part where I got to upload photos, then sure, go for it. Nevermind that I haven't used my Yahoo ID for anything in about seven or eight years, because it's been that long since Yahoo has offered anything that I had any interest in using, but that's the way it goes. So I click the "merge" button without thinking too much about it, having no idea that in doing so I've probably ensured that I'll never end up using Flickr again.

What's the problem, you ask? It's been a year, so I don't remember my Flickr password. Simple enough, I click the "forgot password" option. Except instead of being asked to prove that I'm really the owner of my Flickr account, I'm instead being forced to try to prove that I'm the owner of my cobweb-laden Yahoo ID. Yeah, good luck on that. Beyond my email address they only want two things from me, my date of birth and my zip code, except I really have no idea what my zip code might have been when I created my Yahoo ID or what my zip code might have been the last time I used it (they don't specify which). I've tried every zip code I can remember having ever lived in, but no dice. So thanks for picking the worst possible account verification information you could possibly pick, because nothing is quite so temporary or easily since forgotten as the zip code you lived in back in 2001...or was it 1999?

So my Flickr account is, in effect, being held hostage by Yahoo because it's been years and years and years since I've done anything with any of Yahoo's lame services and it's been so long that I can't recall which zip code I was living in at the time.

There's apparently another option in which Yahoo seems willing to stop holding my Flickr account hostage if I do something involving a credit card. Really?

Sorry, but I give up. I'm sure I could write them, call them, pester them however necessary until they remove my account from whatever rat-hole it's currently trapped in, but I'm just not sure it's worth my time. This is the kind of bureaucratic nonsense I expect when I'm dealing with someone horrible like my bank or my cell phone company, not a photo sharing site.

I might go and create a whole new Flickr account just to get this latest batch of photos posted, but seeing as how something felt wrong about giving them a few bucks a month for an unlimited account to start with, today's experience all but ensures that the Flickr-Yahoo conglomerate won't be getting any of my money.

Sorry Flickr, your merger with Yahoo happened a long time ago. You've had forever to figure out how to keep your user accounts from getting tangled up with the ghost of an inactive Yahoo ID. As a solution, I've added the PodCamp NYC photos to the "iProng Magazine" page on Facebook, which is publicly accessible (you don't have to have a Facebook account). I think that solves the problem.