Holtzbrinck Online: Yahoo's Flickr Snafu

February 01, 2007

Yahoo's Flickr Snafu

You may have heard about this already, but if you don't then the Wired article will get you up to speed. The crux of it is that Yahoo, in building a portal page about the Nintendo Wii decided to stream Flickr photos tagged with "wii" onto the page.

Flickr users got snarky and decided to tag a bunch of photos "wii" photos that have nothing to do with Ninendo's game console (e.g. the "I'm with stupid" image to the left, which points at Yahoo's logo).

Yahoo can't filter out the non-Wii photos because tagging is obviously the only metadata they are using to parse through Flickr's photos and since Flickr's license allows users to retain copyright over the photos they load on to the service Yahoo can't get the tags themselves changed.

I feel some sympathy for Yahoo here. It is unbelievably tempting to try to tap into the popular web2.0 sites (such as Flickr, YouTube and MySpace). Doing so grounds a corporate project in the lives of real people and quickly generates content that should be appealing to users. And having your photo featured on a Yahoo portal is pretty much the definition of 15-minutes of fame.

One can't help but wonder, if it had been a small internet start-up that chose to use Flickr this way, would they be getting lauded by users for their innovative idea? Or would they be harassed for the temerity of using someone else's content?

Posted by Matt on February 01, 2007 at 02:33 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink

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