Flickr flak

The almost inevitable backlash against the ever-emphatic net giant Yahoo!'s purchase of Flickr is beginning, as this piece in Wired attests.

Disgruntled German artist and Flickr user Thomas Müller has set up Flick Off, in a bid to spread his anger about a coming change to users' Flickr logins. As I type more than 850 people have joined the group, who are threatening to kill off their Flickr accounts (overdramatically referring to this as "the Flickr Accounts Mass Suicide Countdown group") if Yahoo!/Flickr proceeds with plans to force users to log in with a Yahoo! ID in a change that will take place by early next year. The idea of melding Flickr logons with the Yahoo! mother ship is deeply disasteful to some users: as James Sharpe comments on Flick Off, " I don't want to join with Yahoo, if I'd have known this was going to happen I would have never joined Flickr in the first place."

Others, though, are less bothered. Will Merydith says: "Honestly, I don't understand the point here. I must be missing some key piece of information because from where I'm standing this whole 'protest' seems childish. You should call this group 'Flickle'."