The folks over at Flickr have announced some ‘unfortunate’ new features to the service.
The main news is that those of us with an “Old Skool” (their words) Flickr account will have to associate it with a Yahoo! ID by March 15th in order to be able to continue to administrate/upload to our accounts. I guess those of us who supported Flickr from the early days got ‘2 Kool 4 Skool’.
They have also announced that those with more than 3000 contacts should be, well, less social with the social software as they will be capping you at that 3k limit. Apparently you just can’t be that popular anymore.
Finally tags on photos will be limited to 75. I wonder what happens to existing photos with >75 tags? I hope they don’t chop off any offending tags, they could be the most pertainant ones!
Joking aside, it’s not been very clear how this announcement benefits Flickr users. If you taketh in one hand it’s always good to giveth in the other – not sure how/where that has happened today. There is some talk that it will make the pages ‘load faster’ – but then so would removing comments or the photos themselves, doesn’t mean it’s worth doing!
Thomas Hawk (of Zooomr, but also big Flickr user) weighs in too:
At Flickr in addition to a 200 photo limit for free accounts, we will now have a limit on how we can access the system, a limit on our tags, a limit on our contacts, what’s next? A limit on our photos?