brad dielman

I paid a visit to Flickr earlier today only to find this message instead of my photostream:

Flickr is having a massage.

For updates, please check the Flickr Blog.

No big deal. I’ve seen it before. I did check the blog and I read the following:

Well, we’re sorry about the downtime folks, but some of our image caches flaked out on us, which caused all sorts of weirdness on the site. And not good weirdness, either.

I didn’t think much of it. Server issue. It happens. I have to deal with problems like that from time to time. Well, a few hours later I decided to try again. Flickr was back online! Cool. I decided to view a photostream of a friend of mine when I noticed that a thumbnail of one of his sets had a picture of a naked woman. Now, this didn’t offend me in anyway, a bit strange and somewhat out of place though. Especially since the photostream was from a trip he had taken a while ago, and I know I would have remembered seeing this picture.

Deciding it was nothing, I moved on to my photostream and to my surprise I found a pixelated picture of a beauty salon where I should have found one of my nephew dancing with my daughter. Looking further, where there should have been a picture of Madeline with her cousin Allen, there was a picture of what appeared to be a man covered in chocolate. Not exactly something I would put in a Christmas card.

Needless to say the nice folks at Yahoo… er, I mean Flickr have taken the site down again:

This is no fun. Photo cache flake outs are everywhere.

Again we apologize for the downtime. I’ll update soon.

Let’s see what the morning will bring I guess.

Checked this morning and everything seems to be back to normal. Not a moment too soon either. My mother emailed me this morning to say that she was viewing my recently uploaded photos.

When logging into Flickr this evening I found the following message in my inbox:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. I’ve been with Flickr for awhile and watched as the sign in page was changed after Yahoo! took over. First it was the normal sign on, then the page was equally shared between ‘Old Skool’ account members and those with Yahoo! IDs. Then we were relegated to an obscure link at the bottom of the page. Now they are doing away with it altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, I will continue to use the service. I love Flickr. Its one of the best services on the web and I have no intention of leaving. I just feel, well, kind of like the old members were sold out. I understand the rationale behind having a unified sign on process, but it doesn’t feel right.

It won’t be long before my account on Del.icio.us is switched over as well.

I know I’m making a bigger deal out of this than need be. I just wanted to rant.