Hey, thanks man!

I’ll add you as a contact and check some of your stuff out as well as soon as Yahoo lets me start adding contacts again.

Me, I already had a Yahoo! ID and had merged it immediately, since I saw no reason not to. I have no dog in the Yahoo! vs. Google thing, since I know folks from both. Neither company is good nor evil. In fact, I think anthropomorphizing corporations is silly and misguided (all you Apple fanatics are freaks).

Totally agree with you that the learning is Yahoo! learning from Flickr. I’d say there’ve been huge strides in this department from the much touted maps API and Yahoo! developer network to the open hack day and in general, an openness to a lot of our data. Can it be better? Yes. Wayyyyyyyy better. Can it be faster? Most definitely.

It _is_ like moving a battleship sometimes and is rather frustrating but on the other hand, I at least know that some of us inside are working to change things.

Apologies for the hostile tone, it was late and I was frustrated with sifting through even less civil responses that had little grounding on reason.

You’re absolutely correct with regards to the ownership of the photos. Although that also should be pointed out as a plus. One of the biggest mistakes Yahoo! made in its history was when it made all Geocities content the property of Yahoo!. Flickr lets the photographers keep the rights, as it should.

I can totally see someone messing up on the tag stream and getting the non-CC licensed photos. Alas, these kinds of oversights are kind of par for the course in these kind of roll outs, not just at Yahoo!, but pretty much across the web. I’m glad they fixed it quickly and responsively.

It looks like Yahoo is a very slow learner.

First, I’ve added a disclaimer that I’m not a staff on Flickr. So take what I say as you will.

Yes, Web 2.0 is about sharing and openness. Which exactly is what Flickr does. If someone created a mashup using Google Maps and Flickr’s geo-data, that’s great. Having Google Maps integrated with Flickr is not just problematic for the obvious reasons, Flickr’s traffic would also require a specific deal since it overloads the request limits imposed by Google’s API. Not to mention, when you integrate an external product into something that core, you’re susceptible to any changes they make, including any advertising they may decide to put on it.

I’m not sure why you got that message about the Yahoo! mail. When I merged a year or so ago, I never once accessed my Yahoo! mail on that account. When I went yesterday for the first time, it gave me a sign up and the only mail I had on it was “welcome to Yahoo! mail”.

One thing I would emphasize is that neither flickr, nor yahoo own the photos – the photographer does. Even though the photos are displayed in a public forum on flickr, they are displayed in the public forum the photographer has chosen. This doesn’t mean the photographer has consented to them being displayed in ANY public forum.

Your statement that the photos which were displayed were classed as ‘creative commons’ is incorrect. Initially they were displaying photos which photographers had labeled as ‘all rights reserved’. The builders of the wii site either made a judgment or programming error that they quickly corrected when the issue was pointed out to them (kudos to them).