Someone at flickr should be fired today
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.