“If it were to close down, I’d feel quite sad about it but really wouldn’t be that surprised,” Ward said.
Both are concerned about the platform’s future under Verizon’s ownership. These were people paying money for a service that wasn’t working, so people gave up and left,” he said.īonner and Ward still use Flickr, but not nearly as actively. “Things would break and it would take eight to 10 months before someone would respond. We were clearly not the target audience any more.”īonner agrees. It was a little bit insulting to people who had been using it so actively for so many years. “When we gave feedback it felt like no one was listening. “We all had a lot of hope that Yahoo would be able to bring it back to life, but the changes that were introduced took away things we really loved,” she said. The company finally released some functional mobile apps and started offering a terabyte of storage space to users for free, but it was too little too late.įor Ward, Yahoo was desperately trying to appeal to the Instagram generation, and in doing so started to alienate the site’s core users, many of whom were professional photographers. Yahoo seemed to listen, at least fleetingly. Bonner bought the website and used it to host the simple message: “Please make Flickr awesome again.” When Marissa Mayer took control of Yahoo in 2012, Flickr’s core users were hopeful that it might get the attention it deserved.
Flickr played a very big role in how we used the web, helping us understand what we want when we share photos Photographer Sean Bonner When it did eventually launch in 2009, it was painfully slow and buggy. The final nail in the coffin was Yahoo’s foot-dragging over launching a Flickr mobile app as smartphone photography exploded in popularity. He and his co-founders thought they’d be nurtured by the mothership, but instead found themselves fighting for resources. “The founders were still using the website and you could interact with them,” Bonner said.įlickr’s founder and now Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told Wired that innovation at Flickr died as soon as it was acquired. It was the perfect platform for us,” she said.įlickr was bought by Yahoo in 2005, and in the early days it was a happy marriage. “Many of us forged really great friendships. London photographer Laura Ward joined in 2005 and was heavily involved in a Brixton-based community group using the platform as a way to explore the neighbourhood. There was a really vibrant community and every time you posted a picture there were hundreds of people responding and being very supportive,” says Sean Bonner, who has uploaded almost 13,000 pictures to the site.
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