"Merge Day"

Daily Ink

Stored in: Flickr News

Posted On: March 20 2007

By: Bryan Partington

Hello my fellow 'old skool' holdouts.

I'm pretty excited about today, March the 20th. For all of you with better things to do than ponder the politics of entitlement, tomorrow is the day of doom. The day when the stalwart tribe of "old skool" revolutionaries must submit humbly before our mighty yahoo!™ overlords.

This means that I'm going to have to finally leave flickr forever. I cannot continue to use this service in good conscience, knowing the inevitable evil that will overcome flickr henceforth.

...

Okay, so I don't REALLY believe any of that, and I'm not really leaving flickr .. but I do understand where the people who are having difficulty with the account merging are coming from. After all, flickr is different than it was when they signed up and account merging is a reminder that flickr won't always necessarily be stewarded by the same people or same ethos as it has been in the past.

Flickr's founders developed it and other projects under the company name "Ludicorp". "Ludic" from the Latin for "play" and "corp" from the ominous English epithet "corporation". An odd, whimsical combination of the serious and the absurd.

Ludicorp's "corporate philosophy" before merging used to be ..

Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent ...

... The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

The goal is to kick ass.

I think that the flickr team still holds true to this philosophy, within yahoo!. What bothers many early users, who were attracted to this attitude, is that this philosophy may not continue as the flickr service becomes increasingly dependent on yahoo!

Although yahoo! does have a somewhat different corporate attitude, one that I find extremely troubling at times, they seem to also have the wherewithal to keep flickr largely independent. Some users see account merging as a risk to this independence, and I think that's understandable.

That said, flickr really IS very independent from yahoo. They have their own direction, are headquartered off the yahoo! campus and have been successful enough that they can keep doing things in their own way. I think that so long as this state of affairs continues, flickr will continue to be have fun and continue being full of surprises, kicking ass with ludicorprealian spirit.

If not, that will be a problem.

Still, I won't merge my account until I absolutely have to, if only because I'm kinda' looking forward to getting temporarily locked out of flickr for a while. This is my perverse idea of "fun", and you can consider the date circled on my calendar.

3 comments on this Ink

On March 20, 2007, Linda Blakely said ...

On March 20, 2007, Brenda Anderson said ...

On April 09, 2007, Tracy Lee Carroll said ...

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