I would normally expect heads of companies to speak with some amount of circumspection when it comes to talking about direct competition. While of course not expecting them to ignore who they compete with, I don’t usually expect them to go on repeat attack. 

From May 2006 until December 2010 I worked at Flickr. I know both the people that started it, the Ludicorp team, and I also know all the Yahoo!s that came after. I managed the help Forum for most of that time as the technical community specialist in charge of user bug reports, but also was deeply involved with community in many aspects. I was there for big triumphs as well as big disappointments. It was never boring, to say the least. I finished my working life there as QA Engineer, when I decided to move on to another company. It was certainly not out of unhappiness at the team I worked with or the site, I just wanted to do something different and family took my life in another direction. However, I still upload content nearly every day. Many of the staff, past and present, keep in close contact, and there is a lot of professional respect for the work that continues- from the founding team to the people who maintain it and work to improve it today. With regards to photography, many of the Flickr staff are accomplished photographers in their own right, and work hard on their craft as well as they do their jobs. 

 Today I saw a blog post from SmugMug, which took aim at a recent incident on Flickr in which a member who had reported an issue with another account, instead had his own account deleted in the process. Obviously, this was a pretty awful thing to happen. From working in the Community side of Flickr, I know very well that whoever made the decision was deeply impacted by this. Trust me, it is upsetting to make an error of this magnitude alone. 

Now, over the years I had seen little potshots sent over by Don MacAskill on his personal SmugMug blog and while it bothered me, for the most part I ignored it as I was an employee of his target. There’s no way you would catch me engaging with the kind of stuff he would post. Like a blog post from 2007 titled “The Dark Side of the Flickr Acquisition”. Yeah, we get it Don. “Dark Side”. “Evil”. Ha ha ha. Boy, aren’t you clever. That’s so cute. Whatever. More on that later. Late last year there was a leak of future plans regarding Delicious, the bookmarking service that Yahoo! purchased that used the term “sunsetting”. Frankly, Yahoo! had some pretty clumsy, late and dumb PR that followed that incident, though they said there was no shutdown plan, that they intended to shop for a buyer. I use Delicious myself, but don’t think it was ever understood by company very well, and it never had the same kind of growth path that Flickr did. It certainly didn’t have the same type of audience potential, so perhaps Y! finding another home will give it the attention it didn’t get in Sunnyvale. What does this have to do with SmugMug? Well, another opportunity to use FUD to sell their service over Flickr, targeting the Delicious issue. And now today, more of the same. I saw some of my former colleagues were annoyed at this, and when I read the blog post, I understood why. (Nevermind that the account was restored, SmugMug doesn’t mention that.) These are people who take their jobs very seriously, are extremely smart, work long hours, and are on the front lines of a product that has had monumental success tied to it. They aren’t dummies, and they don’t deserve the disrespect. So I took the opportunity to send a little jab at Don via Twitter. He responded immediately with some silly hyperbole like the “industry’s PR nightmare” and hinted the reason he did this was because his customers were asking if they should leave SmugMug. Oh please, spare me. That was followed by some patronizing and condescending tweets about Y! screwing up all of my hard work with some more hyperbole saying if Flickr hadn’t made that mistake the “world would be a better place.” Good God, what tripe. Considering he doesn’t know me from Adam, I’m not sure how he knows what work I did though I am pretty sure it was easy for him to do some research once we had our exchange. And the world would be a better place? What is that supposed to mean- the Israelis and Palestinians would find common ground at last? Cure for cancer? 

I then tweeted that I saw employees trashing Flickr in photography forums. He responded: 

“Can’t control my employees”

Perhaps. However, what he doesn’t know is that what I saw was someone putting this into practice based on yet another post titled “Fleeing Yahoo Photos?” which offered discounts for migrators. If you read the blog, you can sense bitterness that SmugMug wasn’t one of the pre-selected sites which you could migrate Y! photos (those that were: Shutterfly, Photobucket, Snapfish and Kodak Gallery). Offers for transitions is not a big deal, that’s the marketplace at work. So, this was around the time of the Yahoo! Photos migration to Flickr in 2007. I was working overtime on this project, as were a number of other people. I worked my tail off trying to take care of people migrating, and it was a monumental task to make it happen. Unrelated, I used to peruse photography forums looking for technical solutions on some issues Flickr members would report. Once I saw someone identifying himself as a SmugMug technical support person in one, saying some pretty untrue things about the Flickr support staff, people I knew and worked alongside, and offering either codes or advertising the deal at the same time. I then saw him on another forum, doing the same thing. I looked him up on SmugMug, and indeed, he did appear to be a staffer. As this has been nearly 4 years, I can’t identify the person, and have no interest in doing so, but it seems to highlight a culture FUD and mud-slinging that Don MacAskill seems to practice. I know very well I would never have gotten away with trashing the competition with the way he does- I can’t say I would have lost my job, but I most probably would have been removed from speaking publicly for Flickr at the time and put on a short leash. In any event, I would never have dreamt of publicly criticizing another service, and would be embarrassed to do so. I guess if you are the CEO, you feel you can say it any way you want, no matter how tacky. People frequently ask what alternative services are out there, and the stance of Flickr has always been, if there is a better solution for your needs, than by all means, go for it.

There is no question that what happened was awful, and it was already apparent in the the email exchange which the member made public, that the mistake was acknowledged along with profuse apology. This was a hard working employee who made an error- something I would expect we all can sympathize with. I know better restore plans had been in planning for a while, it was even mentioned to Flickr members in the Help Forum on a number of occasions- so that isn’t a secret- but I honestly don’t know what kept it from coming to pass sooner. I would not be surprised if something is finally put into place soon, but I am not privy to such information any longer. However the short dialog I had with Don leads me to think that he feels that since a lot of the “voices” of the old Flickr guard are not there, that the people who work there are not worthy of respect or that they have no respect for the members (which is nonsense) and can get more brazen with his attacks.

“Can’t control my employees”, maybe not. But when their leader engages in the type of trash talk he does, perhaps he had no intention of controlling it.