In the last week or so the last hold-out on Flickr from the bandwith hog of infinite scrolling has gone and you can't view groups in thumbnail view anymore.

Now groups have fallen the only place left on Flickr where you can see pictures in thumbnails is the photostream and you have to manually add ?details=1 at the end of the URL in order to do it on someone else's photostream.

There's also been an uproar about the insertion of a Yahoo toolbar at the top of the page in Flickr which links into other services on Yahoo. This has been in place for several weeks now but I wasn't aware of it even though I still have a Flickr account as it doesn't appear to have been implemented in Europe yet. This bar appears whether or not you are on a free, paid or pro account. There's even been a discussion on Ipernity about it.


The toolbar is just another pointer to the fact that Yahoo have no interest in the current users of Flickr and their marketing is aimed squarely at the mobile market for picture storage and upload. In those terms the Yahoo toolbar makes sense. If you have attracted in new customers to Flickr then you want them to "click onward" to your company's other services so a navigation toolbar at the top of every page pointing to Yahoo is a reasonable thing to do in company terms.

However it just reinforces my decision to drop my Pro account on Flickr in order to use the money to buy a club account on Ipernity. Flickr had no interest in me as a paying customer so I've returned the favour by not paying anymore.

I've also done a little research on Yahoo and Tumblr and already Yahoo have started to impose their corporate ideas on Tumblr.

The main problem that Yahoo have with Tumblr is that there is a lot of porn on it. As long as all the people in the pictures are either paid professionals or volunteers and over the age of consent in their particular country it doesn't bother me but it will bother the advertisers if their products start appearing beside porn or if their adverts appear on a site where porn is just a click or a simple search away. In order to do away with this problem Yahoo have removed all porn related sites on Tumblr from their site search results and tag searches and also apparently from results produced by external search engines like Google. In the process a lot of Tumblr sites which are not porn but may use the tags such as #gay or #lesbian have also been caught up in the ban.

That may cause Tumblr to stop being the "happening site" which they hope to use as an advertising cash cow to get their $1 Billion back but Yahoo's problem is that Tumblr may already have stopped being the happening site on the internet. Usage stats show that by the November before the purchase Tumblr's usage statistics had already started to decline. It may be a blip but then again Yahoo may have bought in at the top of the market. It doesn't mean that they won't regain their outlay costs through advertising revenues but it could be more difficult.

Yahoo's problem with Flickr is the same where they are trying to break into an existing mobile based digital picture market. The only upside for Yahoo is that they've spent next to nothing on Flickr apart from the forced change from thumbnail to infinite scroll view as nothing has been done with the back end functionality and any additional storage needed for the 1TB storage offer can be added gradually and as needed as (or perhaps if) they gain more users and as current users upload more pictures.

If Flickr fails to gain market share in the mobile app world then I suspect it will be offloaded so they can concentrate on Tumblr as that's where they've spent the money so I'm glad that I'm here on Ipernity.