Today if you want to share photos you go to Facebook, and if you want to upload and store them you use Dropbox or SkyDrive writes Mat Honan. But it didn’t always used to be this way – at one point Flickr was the place to achieve all those tasks. Then Yahoo bought Flickr and “murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.” Here’s how:

• When Yahoo purchased Flickr it focused on integrating it into Yahoo’s ecosystem rather than developing new products or features. This alienated the site’s prior fan base. At one point it required all Flickr users to abandon their old accounts and adopt Yahoo accounts.
• Moreover Yahoo spent too much time trying to monetize Flickr’s sophisticated image index.
• Yahoo had all the pieces in place to dominate social on the web – but it never put them together and now Facebook is a behemoth that Yahoo can’t compete with.
• Yahoo also missed the boat on mobile. It took a long time for Flickr apps to be released, and to this day the apps are slow, ineffectual, and lack basic features.
• Today Yahoo is trying to right past wrongs and is trying to take Flickr in the right direction. However the road ahead is difficult and Yahoo’s future itself is mired in uncertainty. The best outcome might be for Yahoo to spin Flickr off or sell it to somebody else.

To read more of what is an extensive analysis not only of Flickr but of Yahoo and the recent history of the web as a whole, and to find out how this all relates to cats with laser eyes, as well as some choice anecdotes and quotes, click here.

Source: Gizmodo