How yahoo killed flickr and lost internet

Web startups consist of two components: people and code. People make code, and code makes people rich. The code is like a poem: it has to satisfy certain structural requirements, however, art may appear on the basis of this structure. However, code is an art that does something useful. This is a collection of something new based on just one idea.

And here is the story of one wonderful idea. Something that no one has done before, the moment of change that made the Internet the way we know it today. This is a Flickr story. And how Yahoo bought it, killed and at the same time deprived itself of significance.
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Remember the Flickr motto? "Almost certainly the best online application for managing and sharing photos in the world." Epic in its indiscretion boasting, seriously-ironic statement.

Since three years ago, Flickr was of course the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing could come close to him. If you were interested in digital photography, or you wanted to share photos with friends, you used Flickr.

Today, however, this motto sounds like crazy posturing. Photo service, which once could conquer the world, has now become yesterday's news. Want to share photos on the web? For this there is Facebook. Want to look at the pictures that your friends make like? Start Instagram.

Even the idea of ​​Flickr as an archive — about the place where you store all your photos, just in case — is becoming more old-fashioned, while Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple and a lot of others offer gigabytes online. Storage for our hungry desktops.

The site, where once were the best social tools, live user base and the coolest storage system, is slipping into useless neglect. Once a hectic community now looks like abandoned urban neighborhoods hit by a housing crisis. Weeds-covered yards. Rusting bicycles in front of houses. Ragged flags. The house behind the house is empty.

This is an example to explore what might go wrong when a living, innovative startup is absorbed by a monster who does not share its values. What happened to Flickr? Same as with many other vibrant, innovative startups selling for money and bandwidth: Yahoo.

And that's how it all went wrong.

At the beginning

It is known that Flickr began as a side service of another product. The spouse development team Stuart Butterfield and Katerina Fake made the photo sharing feature for the product they were working on called Game Neverending. Butterfield and Fake were old school web developers. Those who have small id on Metafilter and accounts on WELL .

Since they were so familiar with the web, they soon realized that their real product was not a game: it was its side function, the ability to share photos online. It was 2003, and the task of sharing photos was new to people. Thus was born the Flickr.

He became a hit . Especially he liked bloggers, because he solved the oldest problem of hosting photos. This happened in the days of the gray-haired web, when data storage was worth the money.

Two years later, in 2005, Butterfield and Fake sold their company to Yahoo, whose deep pockets promised a bright future for Flickr users. The company increased the amount of monthly storage to 100 MB for free users, and removed the restriction for paid ones. Everything had to be great; At first everything seems beautiful when you first hug your corporate mom.

When startups become successful

Very few people manage to create a successful startup. But, becoming a hit, he can instantly change the established order of things. Suddenly, these two elemental ingredients — people and code — become very valuable to established companies that seem to have settled on the untouchable corporate Olympus. It should feel like a terrific compliment and recognition. What would you do in this case? If you created something beautiful and useful, what would change the status quo? would sell? to sell it?

Successful startup founders are faced with this choice. Create something good, and you will receive offers to buy. But if in other creative areas this is disapproved, on the web it is considered a gift from heaven.

Maybe it should not be. On every YouTube there are a lot of scary stories about how great people with great products sunk into the gaping womb of indifferent corporate mergers. Dodgeball got lost in Mountain View. Favorite bookmarking services like Delicious have remained unfulfilled information fields.

Some young companies are following an independent path. Recall Foursquare. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Each of them scornfully rejected offers to buy, and now they are stronger than ever. Everyone found their business model. Or even StumbleUpon, which rose to its feet only when its founder bought it back from eBay and re-promoted, as an independent company.

It is no secret that for many entrepreneurs such a way out is the original goal. Sell ​​before the first line of code is written. But for the chosen ones, the products must become art. They must literally change the world. And for them the sale can be especially problematic.

And Flickr is one of those.

Integration - the enemy of innovation

"Yahoo was great at first," says Flickr co-founder Katerina Fake, who left the company in 2008. “We received offers from various companies, including Google, and I honestly thought that Yahoo was a great manager. She was a great brand manager. He was allowed to bloom. In the two years following the acquisition, Flickr flourished. ”

But even at the very beginning there were signs that this transplant — which seemed so successful at the beginning — would not take root. That they did not have the same DNA. And by and large, this happened because of how exactly this appendage was transplanted by specialists from the corporate development department.

When a new startup comes to an established company, at first it usually encounters the corporate development department (OCD): a group within the business that drives the change. R & Ds usually entrust corporate strategy planning — whether the business will increase or decrease, which markets it will go to, and which markets to leave, which contracts and transactions it can enter into with other companies. Often OCD oversees the acquisition. Plans them. Approves them. And then assigns conditions.

When a large company swallows a small one, a small amount of money is usually paid in advance. The remainder is issued later, based on the achievement of certain goals. This is similar to how certain incentives are embedded in the contracts of professional athletes, only instead of counting goals scored, engineering indicators are used here.

OCD assigns these indicators. They reflect the reason for the acquisition and how the company - in the case of Flickr this is Yahoo - can affect them. They are embedded in the transaction, and the acquisition integration team immediately starts working to achieve them. These are usually engineering indicators designed to integrate the product of a small company into a huge corporate machine.

Since the payment schedule is based on the achievement of OCD conditions, both companies have an interest in tying these milestones to new product opportunities. And this is like a sledge hammer on the legs of the lungs to the rise of developers. Worse, these milestones often simply ignore exactly what made a small company so valuable.

Take Upcoming, the social calendar that Yahoo bought shortly after Flickr. This was necessary in order to receive lists of future events on the ground. Such local data — especially in smaller cities or on minor events — can be very difficult to collect. As a result, everyone gets the same thing. But the data on the Upcoming website was updated by the users themselves. The project was different, unique, valuable.

All goals for the acquisition of the project were tied to the integration of data on local events in Yahoo. At the same time, Yahoo didn't give a damn about Upcoming users, the community that created this data. As a result, Yahoo’s approach has been turned upside down. The value of the company was determined by the base itself, and not by how it was recruited - that is, by the community.

It was an example of amazing short-sightedness, and about the same thing happened to Flickr. Yahoo only needed a database created and marked up by users. She didn't give a damn about the community that had created her, and, more importantly, the continuation of the growth of this community, which could be spurred by offering new opportunities.

“We spent a lot of time at meetings with OCD, where we simply defended our product and discouraged our decisions,” said a former member of the Flickr team.

And therefore, when Flickr came to Yahoo, he was crushed by the requirements of both engineering and service parts, which he needed to perform according to the requirements of the acquisition integration team. It was a black hole for resources, people and finances. And although many of the resources came from Yahoo, they were deposited on the Flickr debit. This led to the emergence of a non-working cycle that actively interfered with innovation.

“Money is borne only by cash cows,” explains one former member of the Flickr team. If Flickr could not earn, he did not receive money (or talented people, or resources).

Since Flickr was not as profitable as some other major Yahoo projects, such as Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it was not given as many resources as other products. This meant that he had to spend resources on integration, and not on innovation. Because of what it was difficult for him to attract new users, because of what he could not earn so much money, because of what (full cycle) he did not receive more resources. And so on.

As a result of such a hunger strike, Flickr stopped casting anchors that he needed to climb higher. He missed out on local resources, real-time projects, mobile apps, and even social networks — although he was a pioneer there. And he did not become a video hosting service - this title was grabbed by the YouTube project. He never became a project for people who, naturally, became Facebook. He remained a project for photos. At least until Instagram appeared.

The Flickr team was forced to concentrate on integration, not innovation. And this led to developments in two key areas.

Communication problems

The best feature of Flickr is not what you think. This is not a way to share photos. In the same way that the function of publishing photos was hidden in the game, something even more powerful was hidden in this function: social networks. Almost ten years ago, Flickr created what would become a social web.

The first goal in the Flickr dual mission is to help people distribute their photos to people who matter to them. Flickr had - and still has - great tools for this. Flickr was one of the first sites where one could very accurately define relationships — for example, a person could be noted as a relative, but not a friend — instead of the simple binary choice “friend / not friend.” You can mark a photo as “private” and no one will see them at all, or identify a couple of trusted friends who can open it. Or you can just share photos with friends, or relatives. These precise settings encouraged distribution, commenting, and interaction. We describe, of course, a social network.

Few people remember, but in 2005, it seemed that Yahoo was doing something. Losing the dominant position in Google search, the company got a handful of small, but interesting socially oriented companies, such as Flickr (social photos), Delicious (social bookmarks) and Upcoming (social calendar of events). There was a feeling that Yahoo was doing something right. This, to some extent, anticipated the advent of Web 2.0: the Internet with the active participation of users.

However, the social success of Yahoo in those years turned out to be accidental. This company did not have (and does not have) its own special strategy. What was the great contribution of its founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, to the Internet? They collected a catalog of links and sold ads on these pages.

It was a banal portal. It was not innovative or technically challenging. For the portal do not need to write algorithms. Yahoo was not much more complicated than the electronic version of the Yellow Pages.

The founders' influence on the company's culture is immense, and Yang and Filo were worried about business, not products and innovations. They didn’t nurture the culture of programmers like the founders of Google and didn’t cultivate hackers like Facebook. They raised a business culture. And for many years it worked well - until Google appeared. And all of a sudden the directories stopped being interesting to everyone. Why climb the hierarchy, if you can immediately jump to what you were looking for by the simplest query?

Yahoo director Terry Semel failed to buy Google in 2001 when he had a chance. And now Yahoo has concentrated so much on winning in the search that it has abandoned social programs. In 2004, Flickr had significantly better tools for social interaction and search than anyone else on the Internet. At that time, Facebook was also a fledgling service, where no pictures could be uploaded except avatars. And Yahoo already had internal social products, like Address Book and Messenger. Sotsialka was clearly the future of the Internet. But Yahoo did not need a future. She had to revive the battle from the past and defeat Google.

“When we looked at Flickr, Google kicked off Yahoo's ass. We struggled to find other areas of search where we could occupy a dominant position, ”said one of the top managers at Yahoo, familiar with the details of the deal.

Flickr had a way to do this. Flickr photos were equipped with tags and tags. And they were so well categorized by users of the service that it was very easy to search for them.

“That's why we bought Flickr - not because of the community. We didn't give a shit about him. The idea of ​​the purchase was not to increase social connections, but to monetize the image base. And there was no talk about any social communities or networks. It had nothing to do with users. ”

That was the problem. At that time, the web was quickly becoming socialized, and Flickr was at the forefront of this movement. Everything revolved around groups, comments, identifying people as acquaintances, friends or relatives. And for Yahoo, it was just some kind of damn database.

The first problems of the community became apparent when Yahoo decided that all existing Flickr users would need accounts on Yahoo to log in. This transition happened in 2007 and was part of the ROC integration process. Flickr launched this process in mid-March.

From the point of view of Yahoo, there was no choice but to change the way it was entered. First, Flickr went international, and it needed localization to comply with local laws. Yahoo already had the necessary tools for this, since the service had already entered other countries. He offered a turnkey solution.

But in general, Yahoo needed to take advantage of the new acquisition. The company wanted to make sure that every registered user could immediately use Flickr, without having to register on it separately. She wanted Flickr to work with Yahoo Mail without any problems. She wanted all her services to harmoniously sing, and not give a cacophony of isolation. The first step was to create a universal login. It was great for Yahoo, but it gave nothing to Flickr, and even more so, it did not give anything to very active Flickr users.

The Yahoo solution RegID has become a nightmare for the existing community. You could not use the existing login on Flickr to get photos - you had to use the login from Yahoo. If you didn't have an account there, you had to create one. And you did not enter the service from the Flickr page - upon arrival you were immediately transferred to the login to Yahoo.

Although Flickr has grown dramatically due to an influx of Yahoo users, the existing community of influential service veterans has been furious. The transition was made clumsily and ignored the needs of the community (the ability to enter the service without having to create an account on Yahoo). This was the opposite of what people expected from Flickr. It was an antisocial move.

And it clearly conveyed to the attention of users and the Flickr team the following thought: now you are part of Yahoo.

This message was intended for members of the Flickr team. The service was proud of its user support, considering it a key part of creating a community. But Yahoo wanted to manage all this with the help of existing departments. One of Yahoo’s goals was to change the photo uploading system, and instead of deleting images after complaints, pre-moderate all the content before it appears online. Flickr believed that this task would take a lot of time and violate the privacy of service members, especially when it came to private photos. The Flickr team made an appointment and went to Sunnyvale Corporation headquarters for an hour-long presentation to defend their opinions. In the middle of the meeting, the vice president, who oversaw Yahoo’s user support, looked at his watch, said that he would soon have another meeting, and left. They were sent to the open.

Heather Champ, head of Flickr community management, then decided that this was the beginning of the end. “I left this meeting, realizing that I cannot continue working. I did not want to stay and watch how they destroy everything, on the creation of which we worked so hard. ”

By the middle of 2008, a year after the RegID fiasco, it was almost clear to everyone that Facebook was becoming a great social network that would conquer the market. Toys of college students and high school students suddenly turned into a social network, from which your mum, your dad, your trainer, and all your acquaintances sent invitations to your friends. Microsoft pumped money into it, and the number of its users was close to 100 million.

In Yahoo, which had its own huge user base and several social products, some people have already warned that they would soon be overtaken in the case of social networks just as they were overtaken in search.

“For years at Yahoo, I set off alarms that Facebook will conquer the adult market if we don’t intervene and use our existing social networks to fight back,” one former Yahoo engineer who worked on products for both Yahoo and Flickr lamented. . “Obviously, this did not happen for a variety of reasons.”

Yahoo already tried to buy Facebook in 2006, for a damn billion. And I could not. Two years later, Facebook was too big to buy. The only way to defeat her was to attack from the other side with a better product. And Yahoo's best hope was Flickr. But then it was too late.

“Flickr was no longer a startup,” explains the engineer, “people did not want to work hard to change the entire product. And even if it happened, Flickr was a project for techno-hipsters, many of them didn’t use Facebook, they didn’t like it, they thought it was banal, boring, evil, badly done, etc., and definitely didn’t want to follow her heels More attention was paid to appearance, feeling, rather than metrics and work decisions. The feeling of what was happening to me was always unpleasant, and I watched Flickr and Yahoo slowly become useless. ”

Force majeure and immovable object

There is a difference between missed opportunity and fakap. When Yahoo failed to exploit the social potential of Flickr, it was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where the company really freaked out, where it slaughtered Flickr with blunt knives and even more blunt brains, turn on the phone and launch the mobile application for Flickr. What do you say - you do not have it? That's it.

Flickr had a robust mobile website back in 2006 — even before the release of the iPhone. It could be used with your crappy Symbian phone or with a tiny screen on the Sony Ericsson T68i. But, in fact, it was just a browser. If you wanted to send a photo from your phone to your account, you had to send it by email.

And then in 2008 something happened that put the entire mobile web into the background: applications. The App Store opened a new era that changed the way we interact. People did not want a mobile web that would force them to switch from the camera application to the editing application, then back to the web, and then to email to upload a picture. They wanted an app that does it all at once. Flickr team members understood this. Unfortunately, they could not do anything.

“Flickr did not have the ability to make its application for iOs — or any other,” laments one former Flickr director. “There was an external team that had an opinion on what the application should do.”

According to insider information, this is where the missions of the two companies collided. The application for Flickr was a top-down decision, led by Yahoo Mobile and its leader, Marco Burris. Flickr team shut up.

Berris had a great idea called Connected Life. It was supposed to be a one-stop mobile service that connects all parts of Yahoo together, right in your palm, and connects all of this with a desktop computer. That was what Apple, Google and Microsoft are trying to do with their cloud strategies today.

Burris was a maniac. At 16, he wrote a word processor StarWriter, raised it to the state of StarOffice, and sold it to Sun for $ 74 million in 1999. By 2004, he ran across the Silicon Valley, and showed everyone the demo, which literally made them open their mouths with surprise.

He went into a room full of investors, took out his shitty folding phone and took a picture of the room. Then he put it in his pocket, opened the laptop and updated the program running there. Suddenly, visitors saw their skeptical faces on the screen. It all worked automatically. Then he explained that he could do the same with any other data - emails, phone numbers, mp3, and anything else. Everything you did on the phone is automatically reflected on the desktop and vice versa. In fact, it was iCloud.

Yahoo bought his company in 2005 for about $ 16 million, mostly just to buy Burris. A month later, she bought Flickr.

Burris was a genius, and in all respects a nightmarish colleague. One of the most honest descriptions was made by Kellan Elliot-McCree, technical director of Etsy, who used to be the main architect of Flickr. He wrote on Quora :

Marco Burris was without a doubt one of Yahoo's most horrendous, political, and hated directors, and for 4 years he led the Connected Life project team, which had full control over all of Yahoo’s internal mobile projects. Flickr , 2006, .

The Yahoo Mobile team has been working awfully slowly on the release of the mobile app. Although iTunes App Store launch in July 2008, Yahoo Mobile waited a year before releasing the official app for Flickr. And when she finally issued this belated beast in September 2009, the result was disastrous. Early reviews in the App Store have been similar to the notes on the pre-alpha release of the worst program in the world.

"It is not enough functionality to be useful"

"very slowly, and over time seems to slow down even more,"

"was in joyful anticipation of this application, only to be sorely disappointed,"

"Slow, zabagovannuyu, terrible navigation"

"Everything is terribly slow"

Among other problems, the application did not allow to upload multiple photos at once, you had to manually send them one by one. It re-compressed photos to a resolution of 450 x 600, killing the quality. Logging in users had to through Safari, and not through the application itself. It is removed from the EXIF file when downloading - exactly what nordy from Flickr would like to see.

People just like his gut hate.

The app looked like a dirty spot on a wedding dress. As one of your review user wrote, "is the worst app to upload photos to Flickr from all that I've tried; in this sense, it is easier to send pictures by email. "

And somehow it has managed to completely wrong to use the two main strengths of Flickr - photos of exchange and storage.

Worst of all - at least in terms of business - from the application it was impossible to log in to your Flickr account. (And this is still the case. It sends you to the web for calling through Yahoo if you want to register as a new user). If other applications were dragging users into their web services (Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and especially Instagram), then the application for Flickr, released by Yahoo Mobile, did not have such a mechanism. It was not a tool to recruit new users, it was only needed by existing ones.

“This is a big oversight,” says Fake. And this is putting it mildly. This is the mother of all fakapov.

Meanwhile, there were all kinds of new applications that could not only take photos, but also to process them. Best Camera and Camera Bag introduced users to the idea of ​​applying automatic filters to mobile photos. Just over a year after the appearance of Flickr app will appear one more application for photographers working much faster. It was called Instagram.

It's too late today. The iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr, but this feeling is not mutual. Flickr is not even among the 50 most popular free apps for photos in iTunes. It is on the 64th place, just after the clone Instagram. You to understand that the application adds to lions pictures with lasers from his eyes, is on 23 th place.



If you can't beat the laser seals, you probably deserve to die.

What's next

Flickr mobile and social failures are symptoms of the same problem: a large company tries to reinvent itself by absorbing the smaller ones, and then blowing in the consumption of what they had. Flickr story is not so different from buying a Google project Dodgeball, or of how AOL bought Brizzly. Favorite online services with the faithful communities they crashed on the rocks lumbering companies captured the vice-presidents.

As a result, today Flickr is not the site that was five years ago. This is an internet backwater. He is not attractive socially.

Flickr recently introduced the alignment of photos titled justified [lined] when all the pictures of your friends are located, like the pieces of a puzzle. This is similar to the way Pinterest photos are built. An interesting and beautiful way to look at pictures, by which is especially evident how seldom people began to update their accounts in the project.

Scrolling through the page, I notice how, one by one, my friends stopped publishing photos. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, I already got to the middle of 2010. So many friends have disappeared. Very similar to the situation with MySpace around 2009.

It is certainly not systematic observation, but I've been watching the actions of many of these people to other social networks (Path, Facebook, Instagram), where they are very active. I see pictures of the same people, the same children and dogs - and they're all a year or two older than Flickr.

Sorting photos in the justified style also shows how much of the photos of my friends are formatted in the form of ideal squares - a sure sign of a photo for Instagram, which they then exported somewhere else. Many streams of photos of my friends consist entirely of Instagram photos. That is, these are just copies of content streams — with fewer comments and other activities — the main version of which exists elsewhere. The only reason they are still on Flickr is the automatic export of photos.

There are other signs. On Stellar.io, which tracks what people post on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr blogs, the information on links from Flickr is not even updated daily. And, of course, there is still this damn traffic schedulefrom Quantcast:



Despite years of ignoring, a tiny, but very talented Flickr team desperately trying to align the ship.

Flickr began the year with the refusal of a handful of features that did not have much sense - such as Photo Sessions, weird capabilities that allow you to show others their automatically replaced each other photos in real time, which was written in large «Yahoo». The team also rushing to roll out new features, such as the same view justified or injection of photographers working on HTML5. They replaced Photo Editor (which formerly belonged to the Google, and now - deceased Picnik) with tools working on the HTML5, called Aviary, which allows people to change the photos, without leaving the page, and works well with tablets. For users with a pro plan, it displays photos in the amount of 1600 by 2048 in order to use the capabilities of the Retina displays.

Flickr product manager Markus Spayring, said that now his team receives from Yahoo everything that they need. (Of course, we have to assume that he is obliged to say so. But still.)

"We have a lot of resources, as well as part of the company's core. People whose portraits have on the About page, are the first team from San Francisco, but with us, and share many developments across. "

As for the hated login through Yahoo, it no longer exists.

“It’s not so important to us what your passport is - Google ID, Facebook,” he says. - At the same time, we allow sharing photos on other sites. We have a lot of well-working and understandable privacy settings, and we consider ourselves a central service. It is in this direction that we are conducting, and Flickr - to the beautiful central service for photos. And whatever you use, your photos will get there. ”

Mobile use of the service is still horrible. The iOS app, although it has improved since it was released in 2009, is still terrible. For example, it still requires you to log in to your Yahoo account through Safari. And it does not offer even basic photo editing features or filters available, it seems, in all other applications for photography.

"I think I can honestly say that especially for iOS, we need to provide the best quality use of our service, but we are working on this very work", - says Spayring.

Suppose Flickr does it all. Let's say the project will be able to fix your mobile app re-inspire the community, and, finally, will be on the former path. The question is: is it too late for that?

His attack is not only Facebook, Instagram, and even hell, TwitPic and Imgur (Imgur, your mother!), But also services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and Box.net. Not to mention the Apple iCloud and PhotoStream, Google Picasa, and, yes, even Google+, which is able to automatically upload photos from your Android in a beautiful full-resolution, keeping Geotags and data EXIF.

So a return seems unlikely.

Flickr still has its value. It has a huge database of photos geotagged, Creative Commons licenses and the Getty, and signatures. But, unfortunately, Yahoo's consistent incompetence is not combined with the use of these valuable properties. If the Internet is a set of pipes, then Yahoo would be flowing sewage covering the crap everything what touches.

Home Flickr hope is that Yahoo will understand its value and decides to make a couple of bucks on him before they enter together into a tailspin. But even in this case, Flickr will wait a long way. People usually do not return to abandoned homes.

Flickr is still pretty good service.But he is cute in the same sense as the box with old photos, pushed under the bed. This is an archive of your dearly loved nostalgia, which you occasionally stumble upon. You pull them out, bring them to the light and remember the time when you were younger, and the web was a more optimistic place, and it really was definitely the best online photo management and distribution service in the world.

And then you close the box. And click on the Facebook icon to see what's new there.