This has been brewing for a little while now, and
Marc's post prompted me to chime in with an
agreement that the best way to go at this point for a Web 2.0 company committed to new openness is to support open
identity standards. The issue is in acute focus right now
after a recent announcement that all independent
Flickr accounts are to be migrated to the Yahoo network next year. Any Flickr members who do not already have Yahoo accounts will be forced to do
so in order to continue logging in to their Flickr account.
A ton of folks are hopping mad about this. The group Flick
Off was started in protest, naming the loss of the small community feel and identity among the top fears, as well
as the simple lack of desire to become a member of Yahoo.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle gets at the heart of my feeling on the issue: “the opposition to the change illustrates
the attachment many feel toward their online identities. So many of us don’t have a gathering place that feels
comfortable and communal… For those who found that on Flickr.com, its transformation into a ‘service’ on Yahoo is a
loss; they are losing something important to them.” To me, the issue is indeed identity — to say “I am a member of
Flickr” is something very different altogether than saying “I am a member of Yahoo,” and the fact that the Yahoo
“membership” is presented as merely a technicality in terms of login details is largely irrelevant. The bitter taste
still remains. As Turkle continues, “It is a harbinger of the greater sensitivity we need to show in the future as we
take more seriously the psychological importance of our digital lives.” As we create these new facets of our digital
selves online, it will become more and more critical that each individual have as much control over our own identities
as possible. I believe the best way to do that is to ensure open standards, such that my growing, faceted digital
identity is not solely under the proprietary control of each and every individual third-party I desire to do business
with. Psychologically, we all have a drive towards wholeness and towards some holistic picture of self — and there is a
real emotional effect generated by having bits of our identities increasingly fragmented into small, locked-in pieces
that are ultimately under the control of profit-seeking corporations. The larger those corporations are, the more
powerless we feel — compare trying to deal with Sprint customer service versus addressing an issue with an item you
bought at a store locally. The transfer of identity from (once) small Flickr to ginormous Yahoo is a shift in power
dynamic, and it has real psychological consequences for the site’s members.
There are those who will look at the whole debate as trivial. After all, we as Flickr members merely paid $40-ish
dollars to use a service on the web — what’s the big deal? The big deal comes when users are not mere users any longer,
and we’ve thrown heart and soul and effort into creating a body of work that stands as a reflection of ourselves, our
lives, and our communities. In fact, this is precisely the allure of Web 2.0 — that we can invest a “mere” web service
with so much meaning. It is also precisely this transformative process that makes the companies themselves valuable —
if you can capture the hearts and minds of your members to such a degree that their participation in your site creates
a new facet of their identity, you have what VCs consider gold in your hands. But tread lightly, for even the smallest
amount of disrespect shown to those identities generates just as much animosity, anger and fear as it would in the
non-digital world.
1. I don't feel you or the rest of those with a problem have adequately voiced their specific problem with yahoo membership.
I signed up for Yahoo's GeoCities long ago. They're still hosting what's left of my first web site, but I grew out of their service and signed up for shared server space with DreamHost where I have greater control of my content and its presentation. I still retained my Yahoo membership, and its never been a burden or even a concern in the back of my mind because its like another key on my keyring. There if I ever needed it, but seldom used until recently. Just because you sign up for Yahoo doesn't mean you need to use their email service. You don't have to use their instant messenger service. You don't even need to use their GeoCities hosting.
It's just the portal through which you will be signing on to Flickr.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by chris joseph