A billion years ago, I signed up for Firefly.
Long before it became a [totally unrelated] cult sci fi phee-nom, Firefly was a music-community/recommendation-service. You signed up for a free account and then filled in your profile with your favorite bands and albums. Then the service would query others’ profiles and suggest other musicians you might like [sort of like last.fm minus the streaming -- this was back when "RealAudio" was a cutting-edge experimental public alpha kind of thing and nobody had heard of mp3].
I liked Firefly and came to enjoy using it and even browsing the forums I seem to remember them having. [If you were there, I was "britain," just like my name.] Then, they got snap’t up by Yahoo!. And I went with the flow and came to enjoy the My Yahoo! custom homepage thing, with its updating news feeds [again, long before XML standards for syndicated feeds], a great deal.
Then, Yahoo! dropped the bomb. The firefly accounts were going to get folded into Yahoo! IDs. Someone else was already “britain” on Yahoo!, and I was going to have to change mine. I asked about keeping mine and got a courteous but clearly boiler-plate response reiterating the position. So I responded and asked how to close the account. There was paperwork, official identification, it all had to be faxed to Sunnyvale in triplicate — too much work. So I changed my Yahoo! ID to “jerryyanghatesme,” because, well, it seemed clear. And “Jerry Yang” is a slightly funnier name than “David Filo.” And then I pretty much fell out of the habit of using it. I signed up for a couple of Yahoo! Groups, which I rarely check.
So I signed up for Flickr last year. I hadn’t begun to use it yet but was getting excited about it, especially with my new camera finally on the way [a Kodak, 5-megapixel, with a printer dock]. Then they got, yes, bought by the ‘hoo, and the assimilation is beginning.
There are heavy flickr users who are promising to abandon Flickr when it finally becomes Yahoo! Photos 2ought6 or whatever. Ah well. I would imagine Jerry Yang doesn’t have much time to hate these days, what with being so busy eating bouillabaise off the chest of a Spearmint Rhino girl. [Just kidding about the eating and the Spearmint Rhino girl. I think.]
As for me, I’m thinking about moving from static HTML made with Galerie to Gallery, PhotoStack, or oneathem other photo sharing web systems. The difficult part for me is that a lot of the old Galerie galleries you can see on b&adotcom have been backed up to CDs, and it might take some digging to find the particular discs and re-generate for a new gallery system, as well as making a new template or adapting the old one to whatever new photo management system I might wind up doing [as Nicki has noted, that sort of thing can be a real drag for people who aren't designers by nature].
