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The Powers That Be have spoken - this is not a democracy. No, you can’t march in the streets to get things changed. No, your petitions will not force the changes you think need to be implemented. No, they really don’t care. This is a dictatorship, they call the shots because they are in control, and you know what? That’s exactly the way it should be.
Bravo to Flickr/Yahoo for taking a stand, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, and telling the anti-video petitioners that no, Flickr is not an open forum designed by the users and that no, your whiney protests will not force them to change their business. Because that’s what it is, a business. It’s not a government. It’s not a coop. It’s not an LLC where everyone owns a stake. It’s Yahoo’s business. And you know what, of all the things Yahoo owns, Flickr is probably my favorite project because they don’t cave to Y!Users and they haven’t branded the site with Y! logos.
But that’s also why I think Flickr Videos is a really stupid idea. See, I like Flickr. Flickr works. Flickr has one purpose and that’s to allow me to share my photos in a simple, easy-to use fashion and Flickr succeeds at that damn well.
Which only serves to highlight my growing problem with most Y!Products. Years ago, when Yahoo was buying everything up, it looked like that was going to be the future. Every site you went to would be a product of Google. Or Microsoft. Or, yes, Yahoo.
But, in time, that model proved fatal because it lacks the familiarity users want, and independent organizations created specialized sites that did one thing and did it well. eBay is eBay because it’s not part of another system, you go to eBay and you get auctions. That’s it. Even their PayPal division, which is so integral to eBay, has its identity kept complete and seperate. MySpace is MySpace. When you say “MySpace” there’s only one site you’re talking about. It may be owned by Murdoch, but it’s not branded as part of his empire.
Digg. Fark. Dictionary.com. Slashdot. The Onion. Blogger. The list goes on of sites that focused on one thing and, when the opportunity arose to branch out, and all of the sites I just listed have branched out, they’ve kept their core, branded product seperated from the new, untested products rather than combine the two and risk dilluting both.
Yahoo has bought up several of the projects I used, and used a lot, and turned them into Yahoo sites. It’s not only taken all of the individuality out of those sites, but Yahoo’s feature creep has made them no longer as easy and fun to use. Sure, it sounds like a nice idea, having everything you use at one convenient portal, but it’s not. It’s not easy, it’s not enjoyable.
When you start adding untried features that are only tangentially related to your core product, both products suffer an immediate lack of focus, and you complicate an already streamlined system that your users have become adapted to. If the untried product works, great, but you risk losing both. Why would you risk a product that’s already found it’s niche and audience when you could just as easily launch the new service on its own and cross-promote?
In the ’80s, every third commercial you saw ended with the tagline “We’re Beatrice!”, showing that said company was part of the Beatrice Foods conglomeration. But that was the only reference to Beatrice in that product line’s advertising. You know what? That went a long way toward making people forget they were a giant faceless corporation. And, let’s face it, giant faceless corporations, no matter how many free donuts they give away or how often they promise to do no evil, are still giant, faceless corporations.
Yahoo has the opportunity to be first out of the gate by adopting this “hidden empire” model, but I wonder if they can change their thinking about their properties to do it. They also have a much better public image than Google or Microsoft, both of which have moved far into the “faceless corporation” realm. Yahoo still has a “little engine that could” image that they really should use to their advantage.
Flickr works. It should be their example of what to do right by users. If they can start shaping their other properties as independent entities and have the Yahoo name become their umbrella, I think they can do serious damage to Google and Microsoft in terms of user base.
