Yahoo Flickr snafu, day two

Update on the Yahoo-snafu-Flickr story from yesterday: first, thanks to everyone for your thoughts, stories, wishes, recommendations!

Good news: I managed to get back into my account, at last.  I had to give Yahoo some personal information, and it worked.  I tested it out by uploading some images and adding to sets, and am pleased to report success.  So, after spending hours of my life, I'm... back to where I started.  I dub this "paying the Yahoo tax."

Bad news: problems remain.

• Communication.  After getting tons of feedback from friends, colleagues, people I haven't heard of, I still haven't heard anything from Yahoo.  Not by email in any of three (3) accounts, phone, comments on two (2) posts here, comments on three (3) Flickr images, one bug report submitted, Twitter tweets, or IM.  So I'm not exactly playing coy.  At best Yahoo must be overwhelmed, as Laura suggests, which implies seriously poor planning.  Otherwise they either don't care what we think, or haven't figured out how to respond to customers.  Doesn't anyone at Yahoo trawl the web to see what people are saying?  What kind of company behaves like this? 
• Bad interface and experience design.  Nearly every step of the way the Flickr->Yahoo transition experience frustrates the user.  For example, following directions should not yield a response that the login you've spent time making up doesn't work, or that the account where your work lies is "not taken."  Yesterday I mentioned getting rewarded for filling in a bug report with a blank screen.  Better yet, sifting through help files and not finding an answer, telling the on-screen poll about this, and getting nothing back as a result doesn't exactly build confidence.  Yahoo's help site seems designed to ward off email or phone contact.  No sign of a wiki.
• (Bonus points: more than a few people have recommended using Flickr's help and contact service, rather than Yahoo's.  That doesn't speak well to the integration process.  Which has been going on for some time.)
• Punishing loyal customers.  I started off with a free Flickr account, then decided to pay for a Pro one because I liked the service.  I've stuck with Flickr for some time, now, and in a variety of ways: adding content in multiple ways (photos, metadata, comments); writing about the service; showing Flickr to many, many audiences.  Yahoo rewards this loyalty - heck, advocacy - pretty poorly.  At best, setting aside their customer relations failure, Yahoo now requires me to remember more account and login information, making me do more work to keep the same level of service.  That is, I have a userid, an account name (which is different), an email address, and pw.  As at least one other blogger notes, this could have been done a bit more subtly.  Instead I'm paying the Yahoo tax.

So, questions for discussion:

1. If Yahoo is trying to be the social competitor to Google's algorithmic empire, why are they so bad at it?
2. Is the idea is to nudge us towards Yahoo accounts in order to simplify things?
3. Speaking of Google, has anyone moved to Picasa from Flickr, and willing to share the experience?
4. Does this business-to-business integration problem signal problems with the Semantic Web, as Stephen Downes argues?

Comments

[Uri L.]

thanks for the ref. Great analysis!

[Tara]

Hi. Did you submit a help case on flickr or visit the forums for help?

[Bryan Alexander]

Thank you, Uri.

Tara, greetings. I did not use Flickr's contact, because the idea was to move to Yahoo. Should I have done that instead?

[Tara]

Bryan, the account merge simply meant we'd be using Yahoo! IDs and not maintaining two systems. We are now using this part of Yahoo!'s technology, but that doesn't mean WE'VE been "swallowed" or anything. If you have a question about Flickr, in this case, merging your Flickr account with a Yahoo! ID, first stop is Flickr customer care or Flickr forums. Yahoo! is Yahoo!, Flickr is Flickr. I hope that helps! I work at Flickr so please feel free to ping me offline.

[Bryan Alexander]

Thank you so much for replying, Tara. I really appreciate your time and attention.

I'll gladly turn to Flickr for help, community, or anything else. That's partly because of my good experience (until this month), and partly because of my not-very-good experience with Yahoo.

I hope "Yahoo! is Yahoo!, Flickr is Flickr" continues, or stays real. Yahoo's use of Flickr images in projects like http://wii.yahoo.com/ doesn't bode well, although the CC climbdown is good. How many brand sites are expected?

Alternatively, Yahoo could try to make itself appealing to those of us who migrated in from the "old school." I'm not seeing any effort along these lines, but would be delighted to hear news.

This post does a good job of summarizing Flickr-Yahoo worries:
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/02/bad_flickr_no_donut_for_you.php