It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at Yahoo’s branding on Flickr.
The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters, just don’t mix well with “middle America Yahoo” as Bartz put it a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign about “Y!ou.” Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers:
“When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys?. Go be cynical about frickin’ Google. You got me pissed off.”
Yahoo also got into a bit of a sticky situation with users when it removed a photoshopped image posted on Flickr of President Barack Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. Flickr took the image down, citing a DMCA notice, adding that “We very much value freedom of speech and creativity.” Thomas Hawk had a good overview of all the gory details.
Strangely, the company not only took down the image, but also removed the Flickr page and comments, even though this isn’t required by the DMCA. And then, in what was a totally contradictory move, Yahoo shut down the forum discussions about the political controversy, cutting off further political discourse about the image.
Judging from the comments in the discussions surrounding the (re)branding of Flickr, users don’t want to be reminded that Yahoo bought Flickr. On the forum, users call Yahoo “stale” and think the logo is “horrifying” and “ugly” with many writing that they’d rather ignore the fact that Yahoo even owns Flickr. It’s kinda sad that even though Yahoo owns one of the most popular photo-sharing sites on the web, Flickr’s users would rather not be reminded of that fact. Perhaps Yahoo should start to make nice with its younger, hipster users that reside outside of middle America.
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And here’s something for laughs—a funny mockup from a community member:
