Beware the Ides of March

Today is the day Flickr requires a Yahoo account to log in. Any original members who haven't merged their accounts with a Yahoo account are supposedly going to be locked out. All this to make it easier for them to manage the login system. Or as I suspect, to bring the pre-Yahoo users under the Yahoo terms of service, which are slightly more favourable to them.

The whole thing, along with the Wii BS and a few recent cases of copyright infringement have made Flickr feel a lot less friendly. Never mind all the trolls in the forums. "Permission? Payment? You should be honoured that a major corporation thinks your photo is worthy of being used in their advertisement."

I merged my account last night. I don't want to give Yahoo a free gift of three months of paid account. I'd miss a few people there as well. But if something as good or better comes along, I'll go, and hopefully bring a few people with me.

As a pointless symbolic gesture I've deleted my user icon and from now on will use the default icon, since I realize we're all just generic users to them. I'm also repeating the gesture I gave the Flickr owners when I first heard they sold out to Yahoo.