be the change you want to see in the world

Little did I know that my humorous exhortation to revisit the drupal icon would generate such a nasty response. Of course, people don’t read entire pieces any more, just the lede and then an evaluation is made and response blasted off. My “Decapitate Drupal, please” post was read as a complaint about the drupal upgrade process, which is wasn’t. The upgrade process is excellent.

The fact that my customer saw the drupal head for the first time and interpreted it to be a “kid in a dunce cap” was the point I was trying to get across. This is how the icon is perceived by people in the market for CMS, then it should be changed. “Decapitate” was used as a joke, people, not as a call for the death of Drupal, which forms an integral part of my business.

The post has been deleted because I really don’t have time to field a bunch of snark and negative feedback from people who didn’t read the whole item. However, one commenter did point out that there is a Drupal redesign group. Khalid wrote:

“Second, regarding rebranding. Check the Drupal.org redesign group on http://groups.drupal.org/. This is the way to influence the rebranding of Drupal, along with actual suggestions of a new icon as well.”

See you there.

As much as I enjoy my flickr community experience, I have to say that I have never seen a large-scale commercial web service that is so poorly deployed. Today, January 2, 2008, I expect everyone will be uploading their holiday photos, and flickr will be under heavy load. In fact, flickr is unusable today. It is so slow that I just close the browser window. I have other things to do rather than stare at a blank screen.

Thing is, if I can anticipate that, it is something that should have been anticipated by flickr as well. With a deep-pockets parent company like Yahoo, there should be no question of performance problems. Instead, they are the rule, not the exception.

I am afraid flickr banks on the fact that it is very hard to leave the service because it is hard to move your photos. It is also hard to leave your established community. So, the poor performance is tolerated by users like me.

There comes a point, however, when things get so bad you just start to question your own sanity in sticking with a service that sucks so bad. Love the new stats feature. The new editing tools are obviously great for people without good software on their local computers. Plenty to like. But when pages won’t load, it kills the rest of the goodness.

flickr recently changed their tagline to “flickr loves you”. I think that is more than a little tongue-in-cheek”. I think some arrogant shit at flickr knows that the service is addictive and therefore they can get away with things few other businesses can. flickr is kind of like the oil companies, or the monopoly hydro company, or the crack dealer on the corner.

I wish flickr would live up to their tagline. I wish someone would stand up for the users and make performance a priority. I am sick of “waiting for www.flickr.com”.

Someone at flickr should be fired today to make way for someone else who knows how to deploy the needed infrastructure to support the service.

Here’s a compelling analysis of why Google wants to buy the 700mhz spectrum in the US. Keywords: free, open. Two words that are not in the cell phone industry vocabulary. Watch out wireless carriers. You better start thinking about how to change your business models.

Once the company announces the wireless broadband to the nation, it will immediately announce that Google Phone everyone has been talking about. The Google Phone will work specifically with the Google system (kind of like Skype) and will be free of charge. The only fee to the consumer is the cost of buying the phone, which can be done over the Google checkout system from online retailers or at fine brick-and-mortar retailers nationwide.

Tonight I googled green hornet insect in an attempt to identify a macro photo subject I took today. I flipped Google over to images, clicked on the fourth one in the results and was taken to my own photo set on flickr. That was freaky.

Check it out.

Since a recent “upgrade” a couple weeks ago, flickr has been running very poorly. I see in the activity bar on my web browser that flickr is now partially serving images using yahoo image servers. Today they had image cache problems.

When I first joined flickr last year it ran flawlessly. No longer the case.

I hope Yahoo gets this sorted out. They are ruining their acquisition, and people will go elsewhere. For a prosumer site, that is the kiss of death. With the photographers go the photos, and without photos, flickr is nothing but an empty CMS.