I was reading the Flickr forums the other week when I saw a comment along the lines of “I think Yahoo are just trolling us now“, which made me laugh. However I’m now starting to think that the comment is squarely in the “Many a true word said in jest” category.
There has been much criticism of the new Flickr design from users, tech bloggers heaped praise on it but the comments from users tell a different story. Two quick examples of this, The Torygraph ran an article about the great new revamped Flickr, and below the line you see Flickr users disagreeing about the new awesome, with comments such as: “Check out the 139 pages of mostly negative comments on the changes on Flickr’s help pages. This isn’t an improvement. It’s a downgrade.”
There’s a similar pattern from The Grauniad article on the new Flickr, where we see comments like this: “It’s a terrible change. I used to be able to carefully curate my beautiful photostream, now it’s just a mass of photos. All the descriptions have gone too. I think Yahoo have made a big mistake. It’s like they don’t *get* Flickr.”
So Yahoo/Flickr have somehow done something political parties crave, they’ve united the right (Torygraph) and left (Grauniad), I suppose they deserve some sort of credit for that! The Flickr forums have heated up again this week, because not content with unleashing the new awesome on photostreams, search and explore, they’ve now hit groups. Some people who were all “Neener Neener” when people complained about the redesign have now had the penny firmly drop, because they largely use groups so put the complaints down as whining, but now they see the new awesome in all its glory.
The problem with the new Flickr is one that should ring a bell with Second Life users. Sometimes we land in a sim and it’s busy, we see grey people, it’s slow. One of the factors for this can be too many large sized textures loading, Linden Lab even have a page on texture usage that explains the problem. So when Flickr started serving up larger images, I was not surprised to see people complaining they were seeing grey boxes!