Friday, February 02, 2007
Shut up and change, it's good for you
1) Yahoo absorbs Flickr
"Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr. We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year. 95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don't. You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you'll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes."
But I don't want to change, thanks. And I'm most definitely not alone. I like Flickr because it's a lovely clean web service which functions very smoothly. I've only ever had to log in once - months and months and months ago - and my computer has remembered who I am ever since. Whereas I'm afraid my experience of web behemoth Yahoo! is somewhat different. Their over-enthusiastic logging-in system forces me to log in at regular intervals whenever I have the misfortune to be using a Yahoo!-owned page. This is because "Yahoo! automatically signs you off after a certain number of hours to protect your Yahoo! ID from misuse". Officially I can set this log-off delay to a maximum of 2 weeks, but I've never known Yahoo! remember me for 14 hours, let alone 14 days, the bastards. Yahoo's other services may be great (and that's debatable), but this persistent insistence on forever logging me off has led me to associate the Yahoo! brand with the phrase "crap browsing experience". And now this crap browsing experience is coming to my online photo collection, whether I like it or not. And if I don't like it, all my photos get deleted. Because change sucks.
2) Blogger forces users to upgrade to Blogger Beta
"It's time to embrace the new version of Blogger! Starting today, a small percentage of users who log in to an old Blogger account will be required to move to the new version. This involves moving your current Blogger account to a new or existing Google Account. After the move, you will need to log in to Blogger with your Google Account username, which is always the email address associated with your account. If you're one of the lucky folks who is prompted to move your account over to the new version of Blogger, you'll be able to postpone this process once (and only once) if you *really* need to get a post out of your head or want to say goodbye to the old Blogger. After that, it's time to befriend the new Blogger!"
Whatever you may have read here last week, I've not yet upgraded my blog to the "new Blogger". I have yet to hear one single evangelical comment from anybody who's switched, just an awful lot of moaning that certain functions are now less functional than before. In which case, how unbearably sanctimonious is Blogger's message above? "Embrace" "Lucky" "Befriend" ...you can almost hear the sound of several thousand bloggers being violently sick as you read it. Blogger have made it sound as if they're doing us Old Skool bloggers a favour, whereas in fact we're all doing Google a favour instead. So please excuse me if my blog suddenly disappears (temporarily) at some point in the near future. It'll just be me and my site being made more marketable, "for my own good". Because change sucks.
Yahoo! want my photos and Google want my words. They may not want to exploit my content directly, but they sure as hell want to track my progress (and your progress) across the internet as part of one über-connected profit-grabbing advertising empire. I realise that change is often essential, and that change often brings improvement. But I just wish that Yahoo! and Google would each stop pretending that their latest upgrade is good for me, when it's clearly been designed to be oh-so good for them instead. We submit, they profit. Because change pays.
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