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flickr is huge, but I don't think yahoo has done very much to advance the original feature set. which is also true for delicious. though I agree there are cases

flickr is huge, but I don't think yahoo has done very much to advance the original feature set. which is also true for delicious. though I agree there are cases, I'm hard pressed to find many. Maybe android (google), but not dodgeball (google).

blasdel 16y ago
Though Yahoo did do things to clean up some of the dipshit decisions made by the founders after they left. Originally if you uploaded anything but photos taken with a lensed camera (like illustrations or screenshots), your account would be marked so that everything you posted never appeared in searches or public site areas. This practice only stopped maybe 2 years ago. They also finally redesigned the photo pages to display them larger than 400px wide. It's no longer lower-res than Facebook, but it's still much slower since they don't prefetch images.
neilk 16y ago
The acquirer rarely adds any features to a startup. When you're small, adding features is relatively easier. If you haven't added the feature by acquisition, it will only take longer when you have even more customers and more stakeholders and a more complicated set of relationships. The acquirer is mainly adding the ability to scale up, either through financial stability or other resources. In the case of Flickr and Yahoo, this is a relationship with its ups and downs, but Yahoo contributed a login system, search technology, millions of customers, data centers, and so on. Except for the search stuff, none of this is really a feature. The acquirer also extends the startup's lifetime, so they can think about taking a year or more to add a feature. For most startups, acquisition represents getting off the treadmill of adding features they can't sustain so their customers will continue to like them. Then they spend a year or more just catching up with their own success, while also integrating with the acquirer's infrastructure.

blasdel 16y ago

Though Yahoo did do things to clean up some of the dipshit decisions made by the founders after they left. Originally if you uploaded anything but photos taken with a lensed camera (like illustrations or screenshots), your account would be marked so that everything you posted never appeared in searches or public site areas. This practice only stopped maybe 2 years ago. They also finally redesigned the photo pages to display them larger than 400px wide. It's no longer lower-res than Facebook, but it's still much slower since they don't prefetch images.

neilk 16y ago

The acquirer rarely adds any features to a startup. When you're small, adding features is relatively easier. If you haven't added the feature by acquisition, it will only take longer when you have even more customers and more stakeholders and a more complicated set of relationships. The acquirer is mainly adding the ability to scale up, either through financial stability or other resources. In the case of Flickr and Yahoo, this is a relationship with its ups and downs, but Yahoo contributed a login system, search technology, millions of customers, data centers, and so on. Except for the search stuff, none of this is really a feature. The acquirer also extends the startup's lifetime, so they can think about taking a year or more to add a feature. For most startups, acquisition represents getting off the treadmill of adding features they can't sustain so their customers will continue to like them. Then they spend a year or more just catching up with their own success, while also integrating with the acquirer's infrastructure.