I've been using Flickr for nearly fifteen years now. It was one of the earliest "Web 2.0" services out there. It was lovely. It gave us a new sense of community around photography. Yes it was a bit quirky - they'd pivoted from the original idea of an online game into photo storage and community but it worked, mostly. And it was an early adopter of tagging and geo-location.
Then it got sold and ended up in the hands of Yahoo! who by then had completely lost touch with what people needed and what the web was about. I've lost track of who actually owns it now and what's happening. All I know is that when I try to go to my photos I get a log in screen that doesn't work. I know it will get sorted eventually but it makes me sad. The disappointment of the open web and the ability to do stuff that just works plus the illusion that it could all be done for free. Of course it can't, but that doesn't stop us trying.
It's also a reminder for me to do some sort of export - it's by no means just the photographs that have value to me, it's the metadata that got created by the community that matters so much more.
So for the time being here's a shit picture of a spider in front of my shed door.
Boo!
