my friend flickr

As for Flickr being acquired by Yahoo, there are unknowns. As one who has grown fond of Flickr and its disposition to shared images with minimal words - the relative absence of words seeming to help cement a communal feeling without lots of positioning - I feel the sort of concern that happens when a local, or home grown, business is acquired by a corporate entity orders of magnitude larger.

Perhaps I feel this way because I used to work in a small start-up type operation that was then glomerated into a much larger corporate machine with completely different values and priorities. Every single soul in the small operation jumped ship, or was nudged into exploring new seas, in a very short time.

Loss of the local and communal in the mergers and acqs of industrial corporatism is an old story. How fully it applies in a case like this remains to be seen. It's wise to accept change; it's sensible to be wary. I feel as though a realm of some shared intimacy, which had my trust, has become a pygmy star in a much larger, less assuring realm with far more vertical layers, cascading luminous profit centers, at the very top of which are, because there have to be, batteries of unblinking accountants. It's these people, not Mr. Yang, who concern me.

Here's a case where an understanding of corporate idiocy and of the nuances of customer sensitivity could make a difference. That, along with lopping off the hands of the accountants.