Tumblr Tumblr Tumblr, Yahoo!
May 19, 2013 11:17 AM Subscribe
Yahoo Inc.'s board has approved a deal to acquire blogging startup Tumblr, people familiar with the matter said Sunday. Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the company, one of the people said. Tumblr would continue to operate largely as an independent business, the people said.
Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005. The reported acquisition cost was $35 million.
The Daily Mail on David Karp, Tumblr's foundr.
But not everyone's ecstatic.
Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo.
Tumblr Users Are Already Revolting Over The Potential Yahoo Buyout
Could Tumblr turn into Yahoo's MySpace?
The Daily Mail on David Karp, Tumblr's foundr.
But not everyone's ecstatic.
Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo.
Tumblr Users Are Already Revolting Over The Potential Yahoo Buyout
Could Tumblr turn into Yahoo's MySpace?
THINK OF THE GIF SETS PEOPLE
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
DO NOT FUCKING WANT
posted by elizardbits at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2013 [35 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2013 [35 favorites]
This in no way vibrates.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 11:19 AM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
That said, tumblr users are already mobilizing to solve this problem once and for all by using the tried and true, wholly valuable irl method of reblogging a link to an online poll.
sigh
posted by elizardbits at 11:20 AM on May 19, 2013 [26 favorites]
sigh
posted by elizardbits at 11:20 AM on May 19, 2013 [26 favorites]
I guess Yahoo really likes the dropped "e" thing.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 11:21 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 11:21 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
.
posted by migurski at 11:22 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
posted by migurski at 11:22 AM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
Seemed inevitable that someone like Google, Facebook or Yahoo would buy them. At least it's not AOL.
posted by octothorpe at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2013
posted by octothorpe at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2013
Ummmm, sorry if I ask this but -
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
posted by Samizdata at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2013 [102 favorites]
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
posted by Samizdata at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2013 [102 favorites]
If they force the login to be tied into a yahoo account, that's a dealbreaker for me. My experience with that was was made me give up on Flickr.
posted by billyfleetwood at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2013 [18 favorites]
posted by billyfleetwood at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2013 [18 favorites]
Also, no reflection upon the OP of this FPP but the writing in the wsj source article is appalling. All that "the people said" and "the person said".
posted by elizardbits at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Great work Yahoo, now you've upset elizardbits x(
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:28 AM on May 19, 2013 [22 favorites]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:28 AM on May 19, 2013 [22 favorites]
$1.1 billion in cash eh? Yup, no bubble at all.
posted by stltony at 11:29 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by stltony at 11:29 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
UNACCEPTABLE
posted by elizardbits at 11:31 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 11:31 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Geocities 2.0.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:31 AM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:31 AM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
Tumblr = Geocities
posted by vidur at 11:32 AM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by vidur at 11:32 AM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
Just because hey're not on the cutting edge or considered cool doesn't mean they're irrelevant. For example, Yahoo auctions is the #1 auction site in Japan, not ebay. Also, for what it's worth, I think Yahoo Fantasy Football still has a lot of market share.
700 million monthly visitors across all of their properties is still a lot of revenue generation, even if they haven't led the way in anything in quite some time.
posted by billyfleetwood at 11:32 AM on May 19, 2013 [21 favorites]
Just because hey're not on the cutting edge or considered cool doesn't mean they're irrelevant. For example, Yahoo auctions is the #1 auction site in Japan, not ebay. Also, for what it's worth, I think Yahoo Fantasy Football still has a lot of market share.
700 million monthly visitors across all of their properties is still a lot of revenue generation, even if they haven't led the way in anything in quite some time.
posted by billyfleetwood at 11:32 AM on May 19, 2013 [21 favorites]
Bubble up, guys.
You've got 9-12 months to sell your startup for a bil.
posted by colie at 11:33 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
You've got 9-12 months to sell your startup for a bil.
posted by colie at 11:33 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Tumblr Tumblr Tumblr, Yahoo!Okay, hands up, who else read this and immediately thought SNAKE, IT'S A SNAAAKE
posted by Merzbau at 11:35 AM on May 19, 2013 [41 favorites]
I fail to understand how Yahoo is going to make money in a way that's not going to drive away everyone they expect to make revenue from.
posted by trogdole at 11:40 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by trogdole at 11:40 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I tumblr for ya. I tumblr for......$1 billion!"
posted by stltony at 11:40 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by stltony at 11:40 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I fail to understand how Yahoo is going to make money in a way that's not going to drive away everyone they expect to make revenue from.
Advertisers love GIFs and BDSM!
posted by jaduncan at 11:42 AM on May 19, 2013 [18 favorites]
Advertisers love GIFs and BDSM!
posted by jaduncan at 11:42 AM on May 19, 2013 [18 favorites]
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
Define irrelevant. Lots of companies have a fair amount of money. I've heard of Tumblr but haven't the slightest idea what it is other than apparently something bloggy. Does that make them or it irrelevant?
posted by juiceCake at 11:43 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Define irrelevant. Lots of companies have a fair amount of money. I've heard of Tumblr but haven't the slightest idea what it is other than apparently something bloggy. Does that make them or it irrelevant?
posted by juiceCake at 11:43 AM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
All I know is that if affects my enjoyment of elizardbits Tumblr, there will be hell to pay.
(Damn you, elizardbits, I just started watching Teen Wolf because of you!)
posted by Kitteh at 11:45 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
(Damn you, elizardbits, I just started watching Teen Wolf because of you!)
posted by Kitteh at 11:45 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
The guys behind goatse.cx started way too early. If that came up today, they could sell their disruptive paradigm of the gaping anus space to Facebook for a quadrillion dollars.
posted by dr_dank at 11:45 AM on May 19, 2013 [12 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 11:45 AM on May 19, 2013 [12 favorites]
I've heard of Tumblr but haven't the slightest idea what it is other than apparently something bloggy. Does that make them or it irrelevant?
I dunno, because just you don't know much about Tumblr? I don't really mean that to be snarky, but I never get the "I have never heard of this, therefore it is not relevant and/or a thing most people have heard of."
posted by sweetkid at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
I dunno, because just you don't know much about Tumblr? I don't really mean that to be snarky, but I never get the "I have never heard of this, therefore it is not relevant and/or a thing most people have heard of."
posted by sweetkid at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
I'm not a total pessimist about huge companies (at least until I switch jobs!), but I bet there will be some initial changes that will hurt users and make them leave. Still, in the long run, websites need to make money, and tumblr.com was losing money.
Can anyone propose a better business model for the tumbs we love to make bank?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2013
Can anyone propose a better business model for the tumbs we love to make bank?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2013
I dunno, because just you don't know much about Tumblr? I don't really mean that to be snarky, but I never get the "I have never heard of this, therefore it is not relevant and/or a thing most people have heard of."
That was kind of the point. Just because someone doesn't use Yahoo doesn't mean Yahoo does not have more cash than sense.
posted by Foosnark at 11:47 AM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
That was kind of the point. Just because someone doesn't use Yahoo doesn't mean Yahoo does not have more cash than sense.
posted by Foosnark at 11:47 AM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
Occasionally I've tried to encourage my fandom tumblr buddies to toddle over to dreamwidth and establish a bit of a foothold there so everything doesn't fall completely apart when the inevitable occurs. But I find it hard myself to return to "traditional" journaling, particularly when nobody else will follow me to respond and interact, despite my little corner being decidedly more wordy and text-based than seemingly anywhere else on tumblr (other than the RPers).
I'm actually not all that concerned about Yahoo "destroying" tumblr or anything, since tumblr is kind of terrible anyway. It's just the right combination of convenient and shiny for a large number of people, but nobody can really sit there with a straight face and say it's GREAT in its back end. It doesn't serve the needs of a large number of its users clamoring for a more robust comment system and a much better way to block unwanted content. That people have to resort to plugins like tumblr savior and missing epours out a cold one to get anything done on tumblr in a fandom context points to its weaknesses well enough, even if you have no idea about how any of that stuff works.
The problem is that there are numerous culture clashes happening on tumblr simultaneously in any given post, but no other site provides the image hosting. I guess what I'm muzzily trying to say is, dammit, I know people who do good work at Yahoo, but until the current crop of 14 year old fangirls learn to code, fandom's going to be shunted around to one not-quite-right space to another. Grump grump grump.
#rant #teal dear #fandom #imcry
posted by Mizu at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [12 favorites]
I'm actually not all that concerned about Yahoo "destroying" tumblr or anything, since tumblr is kind of terrible anyway. It's just the right combination of convenient and shiny for a large number of people, but nobody can really sit there with a straight face and say it's GREAT in its back end. It doesn't serve the needs of a large number of its users clamoring for a more robust comment system and a much better way to block unwanted content. That people have to resort to plugins like tumblr savior and missing e
The problem is that there are numerous culture clashes happening on tumblr simultaneously in any given post, but no other site provides the image hosting. I guess what I'm muzzily trying to say is, dammit, I know people who do good work at Yahoo, but until the current crop of 14 year old fangirls learn to code, fandom's going to be shunted around to one not-quite-right space to another. Grump grump grump.
#rant #teal dear #fandom #imcry
posted by Mizu at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [12 favorites]
I'm still mad about Google killing YouTube. These acquisitions never work out.
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [20 favorites]
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [20 favorites]
They should buy Reddit and merge he comments.
posted by Artw at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
posted by Artw at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
MOVE BACK TO LIVEJOURNAL
TOGETHER, WE CAN MAKE IT 2005 AGAIN
OR, WE CAN TURN THE WORLD INTO RUSSIA
PRETTY COOL EITHER WAY
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [68 favorites]
TOGETHER, WE CAN MAKE IT 2005 AGAIN
OR, WE CAN TURN THE WORLD INTO RUSSIA
PRETTY COOL EITHER WAY
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [68 favorites]
Yeah, everyone hates this, but I think the deal makes a lot of sense. Yahoo, despite appearances, is not entirely irrelevant. They have a market cap of about $30B, a brand new very talented CEO, and a lot of regular users and ad revenue. Buying Tumblr makes a lot of sense for them. Similarly, Tumblr has a lot of users and a good product but precious little in the way of revenue (rumoured: $13M in 2012 and $15M–$100M projected in 2013). There aren't many tech companies that can afford to pay $1.1B for Tumblr, and many of them (like Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft) don't make sense. Who would you prefer bought them? AOL?
The key thing is that Yahoo better not fuck up. But the 2005-era Yahoo management that let good acquisitions like Flickr wither and die is gone, this is a chance to try it again. With a new CEO at the helm at Yahoo, who saw her previous company succeed with acquisitions like YouTube. And however it works out, I do admire Yahoo for trying.
posted by Nelson at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [28 favorites]
The key thing is that Yahoo better not fuck up. But the 2005-era Yahoo management that let good acquisitions like Flickr wither and die is gone, this is a chance to try it again. With a new CEO at the helm at Yahoo, who saw her previous company succeed with acquisitions like YouTube. And however it works out, I do admire Yahoo for trying.
posted by Nelson at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [28 favorites]
Yahoo is in some ways a best case scenario for someone to buy them out. Any other major player would fold them into their current successful companies, while Yahoo will do the opposite, letting Tumblr be the big fish in the small pond. Now that pressure might break it, but it could emerge as the front-running social site it was always meant to be.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013
What Nelson said.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:49 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Lean in Tumblrites. Just lean in. (yes I know that's a different lady exec)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:50 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:50 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I fail to understand how Yahoo is going to make money in a way that's not going to drive away everyone they expect to make revenue from.
I'm in marketing, I guess, so I don't think this is probably super hard. You just have to know who's hungry to be spoken to at all. So, you know, just spitballin' here and we'll want to see how this plays top-of-funnel, but:
Learn this one weird little trick a reincarnated kobold otherkin shaman-warrior used to stave off past-life regressions.
And then pretty much just repackaged spirulina tabs and self-help tapes.
posted by mph at 11:50 AM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
I'm in marketing, I guess, so I don't think this is probably super hard. You just have to know who's hungry to be spoken to at all. So, you know, just spitballin' here and we'll want to see how this plays top-of-funnel, but:
Learn this one weird little trick a reincarnated kobold otherkin shaman-warrior used to stave off past-life regressions.
And then pretty much just repackaged spirulina tabs and self-help tapes.
posted by mph at 11:50 AM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
I dunno, because just you don't know much about Tumblr? I don't really mean that to be snarky, but I never get the "I have never heard of this, therefore it is not relevant and/or a thing most people have heard of."
For me, it's not that I haven't heard of Yahoo - I definitely have. It's that I'm feeling a huge disconnect between the Yahoo in my head -- which was a nifty search engine when I first encountered it in 1995 and now serves the noble purpose of cordoning off a diseased area of the internet known as Yahoo Answers -- versus the Yahoo that apparently exists and has some sort of coherent business model that allows for big purchases like this.
posted by Frobenius Twist at 11:51 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
For me, it's not that I haven't heard of Yahoo - I definitely have. It's that I'm feeling a huge disconnect between the Yahoo in my head -- which was a nifty search engine when I first encountered it in 1995 and now serves the noble purpose of cordoning off a diseased area of the internet known as Yahoo Answers -- versus the Yahoo that apparently exists and has some sort of coherent business model that allows for big purchases like this.
posted by Frobenius Twist at 11:51 AM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
In addition to all its other revenue, Yahoo owns 24% of Alibaba, which may IPO around 60B+. So they're not exactly hurting despite what people may think of their brand.
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:54 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:54 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I can actually see them serving advertisements in your news feed (the place you go to see recent updates from blogs you follow) instead of putting inline advertisements on pages. I don't know if that'd be better or worse than inline advertisements, but it's an option.
Actually that seems like a more reliable way to serve ads than keyword data analysis. The people you follow on Tumblr could be given impact scores, and brands could enter some sort of ad auction system based on affinity with high impact content creators. If you follow HotSherlockGifs, and Tide (C) runs the numbers to realize that fans of Sherlock are an untapped detergent market, then they could buy a couple thousand shares of ad-serves to people who follow HotSherlockGifs with their new English Musk scented clothing soap. Yah-Tumblr would get most of that money and HotSherlockGifs would get kicked .0001 cent per share sold.
I think one possible problem of my imaginary revenue scheme (well, not counting various ethical and existential problems) is that a lot of Tumblr (like, most of it) is IP that's being ripped off, unaccredited to share with your followers. Does Yah-Tumblr really want to go in to the legal realm of having to deal with that, since they'd now be monetizing that content? Does the BBC get pissed off that animated gifs of their product are now being used to sell Tide and they're not getting any money from it?
posted by codacorolla at 11:55 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Actually that seems like a more reliable way to serve ads than keyword data analysis. The people you follow on Tumblr could be given impact scores, and brands could enter some sort of ad auction system based on affinity with high impact content creators. If you follow HotSherlockGifs, and Tide (C) runs the numbers to realize that fans of Sherlock are an untapped detergent market, then they could buy a couple thousand shares of ad-serves to people who follow HotSherlockGifs with their new English Musk scented clothing soap. Yah-Tumblr would get most of that money and HotSherlockGifs would get kicked .0001 cent per share sold.
I think one possible problem of my imaginary revenue scheme (well, not counting various ethical and existential problems) is that a lot of Tumblr (like, most of it) is IP that's being ripped off, unaccredited to share with your followers. Does Yah-Tumblr really want to go in to the legal realm of having to deal with that, since they'd now be monetizing that content? Does the BBC get pissed off that animated gifs of their product are now being used to sell Tide and they're not getting any money from it?
posted by codacorolla at 11:55 AM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Tumblr is resonsible for 75% of teen wolf watchings
posted by The Whelk at 11:57 AM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 11:57 AM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
Am I the only person on the Interwebz who actually likes Flickr?
posted by Wordshore at 11:58 AM on May 19, 2013 [19 favorites]
posted by Wordshore at 11:58 AM on May 19, 2013 [19 favorites]
Also, in a certain weird way the idea of using your Tumblr follows to curate ad content for you instead of relying on keyword data analysis gets back to Yahoo!'s roots as a web directory. Now, however, instead of being curated by a panel of paid experts, the web is being curated for free (or for cheap) by a bunch of volunteer content aggregators. Yahoo! would just be offering the platform to do it on, and skimming the money that collects on the top.
posted by codacorolla at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by codacorolla at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
"BECAUSE I AM A TRANSETHNIC DEMISEXUAL OTHERKIN," EXPLAINS MARISSA MAYER, THROUGH A SERIES OF INCREASINGLY EROTIC GIFS FROM DUCKMAN AND THE FRED SAVAGE SHOW
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013 [46 favorites]
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013 [46 favorites]
So I guess I know three things Yahoo do now if you include this, YUI and Flickr. Still kind if hazy in how that makes money though.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2013
I second pretty much everything Kitteh said.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by C'est la D.C. at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013
Yah-Tumblr
Worst. Proto-Semitic. Deity. Ever.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [31 favorites]
Worst. Proto-Semitic. Deity. Ever.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [31 favorites]
Yahoo mostly does Yahoo.
Which is to say, display advertising on Yahoo branded properties, starting with the Yahoo homepage itself, is now and always has been the big pot o' revenue. That pot is still big (big enough that Yahoo can buy things for a bajillion dollars once in a while), but is in a slow decline, so the current goal of the company is to either A. get the existing properties to grow their audience size again, or B. add new properties they can advertise against, or C. make one of the smaller, differenter business models make some big dollars (e.g. something something mobile something). Or probably all three, since Yahoo has never been particularly good at doing just one thing at a time.
Presumably Tumblr is a Column B move, with maybe a touch of C.
[Note: I worked at the Y! for a few years but have no special insight into any of the above, as it was a while ago and I was over in the Search debacle, which is a whole 'nother issue.]
posted by feckless at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
Which is to say, display advertising on Yahoo branded properties, starting with the Yahoo homepage itself, is now and always has been the big pot o' revenue. That pot is still big (big enough that Yahoo can buy things for a bajillion dollars once in a while), but is in a slow decline, so the current goal of the company is to either A. get the existing properties to grow their audience size again, or B. add new properties they can advertise against, or C. make one of the smaller, differenter business models make some big dollars (e.g. something something mobile something). Or probably all three, since Yahoo has never been particularly good at doing just one thing at a time.
Presumably Tumblr is a Column B move, with maybe a touch of C.
[Note: I worked at the Y! for a few years but have no special insight into any of the above, as it was a while ago and I was over in the Search debacle, which is a whole 'nother issue.]
posted by feckless at 12:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
It seems like the current tech bubble is just a kind of outsourced R&D for these big public companies with too much cash, right? Startups compete to capture eyeballs and then don't have the stomach to "monetize" on their own so they sell to Google, Yahoo or Facebook who are theoretically better at it (and have at least some economies of scale).
But if that's what's going on ...I mean, the big guys don't seem that great at monetizing all their traffic either. Facebook makes only a few bucks per user per year, right? The top line numbers are in the billions but when you consider the sheer size of their inventory ... even Google's revenue on a per-user-hour basis is probably nothing impressive compared to television or other businesses that compete for our time and attention -- how much do mall retailers make in revenue for every person-hour spent in a mall? How much does Rockstar Games make for every hour that someone plays Grand Theft Auto? I realize these are apples-to-orange comparisons, but it just seems like the time we spend online is worth so much less than the time we spend elsewhere, and that's always about to change (big data! smart targeting! etc) but it never really does.
Could it be that the real demand for online advertising just isn't nearly as high as the hype would have it? Or maybe the $ is being captured by middlemen, like trendy branding agencies who charge a fortune to orchestrate "viral videos" that earn almost nothing for Google? Or ... I don't know, what's going on?
posted by pete_22 at 12:15 PM on May 19, 2013 [10 favorites]
But if that's what's going on ...I mean, the big guys don't seem that great at monetizing all their traffic either. Facebook makes only a few bucks per user per year, right? The top line numbers are in the billions but when you consider the sheer size of their inventory ... even Google's revenue on a per-user-hour basis is probably nothing impressive compared to television or other businesses that compete for our time and attention -- how much do mall retailers make in revenue for every person-hour spent in a mall? How much does Rockstar Games make for every hour that someone plays Grand Theft Auto? I realize these are apples-to-orange comparisons, but it just seems like the time we spend online is worth so much less than the time we spend elsewhere, and that's always about to change (big data! smart targeting! etc) but it never really does.
Could it be that the real demand for online advertising just isn't nearly as high as the hype would have it? Or maybe the $ is being captured by middlemen, like trendy branding agencies who charge a fortune to orchestrate "viral videos" that earn almost nothing for Google? Or ... I don't know, what's going on?
posted by pete_22 at 12:15 PM on May 19, 2013 [10 favorites]
> [Yahoo] Search debacle
A little baffled by this.
I worked at Google when Yahoo Search came out, and our measures showed that the initial repository(*) they were running was actually a tiny bit better than the Google's at the time. Interestingly enough, this degraded steadily as time went on, and the conclusion was that they had heavily tweaked their repo by hand on top queries before they opened, and couldn't keep it up, probably had never intended to keep it up - but they still ended up being pretty close to Google's search in quality for at least the first year that I kept track of it.
It seemed like a pretty solid search engine to me and if I had been involved with it, I'd have been proud of my work.
(* - "collection of web pages indexed to make a search engine.")
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 12:15 PM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
A little baffled by this.
I worked at Google when Yahoo Search came out, and our measures showed that the initial repository(*) they were running was actually a tiny bit better than the Google's at the time. Interestingly enough, this degraded steadily as time went on, and the conclusion was that they had heavily tweaked their repo by hand on top queries before they opened, and couldn't keep it up, probably had never intended to keep it up - but they still ended up being pretty close to Google's search in quality for at least the first year that I kept track of it.
It seemed like a pretty solid search engine to me and if I had been involved with it, I'd have been proud of my work.
(* - "collection of web pages indexed to make a search engine.")
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 12:15 PM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
"Am I the only person on the Interwebz who actually likes Flickr?"
I like Flickr. My impression has been that it's not that people dislike it now or anything, just that it's kind of been superseded by other things.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:16 PM on May 19, 2013
I like Flickr. My impression has been that it's not that people dislike it now or anything, just that it's kind of been superseded by other things.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:16 PM on May 19, 2013
Someone bought the free service I waste countless hours using? I AM OUTRAGE
Or I will be, after one more page of LOLPix...
posted by Brocktoon at 12:18 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Or I will be, after one more page of LOLPix...
posted by Brocktoon at 12:18 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
Your retirement fund, ultimately.
posted by ennui.bz at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
Your retirement fund, ultimately.
posted by ennui.bz at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
Yeah! weirdly enough I have no beef with flickr in its current incarnation. There was a moment of profound irritation when it switched over to yahoo logins but other than that I wasnt all that bovvered. Then again! I am far from a regular user of it.
posted by elizardbits at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by elizardbits at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2013
why are all my fucking commas exclamation points, ipad
posted by elizardbits at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
To be clear, I am in complete agreement that Yahoo Search had the potential to be a genuine rival to Google, and had that potential long after it had been written off by the tech press. There were really interesting things being done with the technology, and insanely talented engineers, product people, and designers working on it. And that was true right up until the MSFT offer.
The debacle was how that effort & potential was persistently squandered. It's possible, though I think unlikely, that they still might make a move in search. I'd love to see it.
posted by feckless at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
The debacle was how that effort & potential was persistently squandered. It's possible, though I think unlikely, that they still might make a move in search. I'd love to see it.
posted by feckless at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Am I the only person on the Interwebz who actually likes Flickr?
I like Flickr, too, but it hasn't changed in years. I rarely use it anymore, and none of my friends use it. They've all moved on to Instagram or putting their pictures on Facebook. There was a time when I could put a picture on Flickr and all my friends would see it. Now it's like shouting into a void.
I think a lot of the blame for this is on Yahoo. They had a terrible iPhone app for YEARS, and they lost a lot of ground to Instagram. Now they have a decent app but it's too little, too late. No one is going to make the switch back, especially since they still charge you to store photos. Why pay when I can keep all my photos on Instagram and Facebook for free?
(I think it makes sense to pay for services like Flickr. Less chance of getting screwed and losing all your photos if they decide to shut things down. But most people will choose free over paying.)
posted by mokin at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
I like Flickr, too, but it hasn't changed in years. I rarely use it anymore, and none of my friends use it. They've all moved on to Instagram or putting their pictures on Facebook. There was a time when I could put a picture on Flickr and all my friends would see it. Now it's like shouting into a void.
I think a lot of the blame for this is on Yahoo. They had a terrible iPhone app for YEARS, and they lost a lot of ground to Instagram. Now they have a decent app but it's too little, too late. No one is going to make the switch back, especially since they still charge you to store photos. Why pay when I can keep all my photos on Instagram and Facebook for free?
(I think it makes sense to pay for services like Flickr. Less chance of getting screwed and losing all your photos if they decide to shut things down. But most people will choose free over paying.)
posted by mokin at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
I think I x-posted with mefi projects, but I might as well leave this here:
Hypno-Tumble
posted by The Ted at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Hypno-Tumble
posted by The Ted at 12:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
The thing is, though, tumblr admin have always been totally uninterested in the wishes and hopes and dreams of the vast majority of the userbase. On the other hand, people who are happy with a thing are way less vocal and visible than people who hate that thing.
tumblr moves in mysterious ways
posted by elizardbits at 12:22 PM on May 19, 2013
tumblr moves in mysterious ways
posted by elizardbits at 12:22 PM on May 19, 2013
I was surprised at how much Yahoo makes from ads on search, about $1.9 billion last year, compared to $2.1 billion from ads on non-search sites.
And say what you well about the terrible design, cluttered format, and ancient kitchiness of Yahoo sites, (an experience that's vaguely reminiscent of visiting Grandma's houses), but Yahoo actually does their content right. Unlike Google, which is pretty amateur at most things. Google news is good, but Google autos? Hah! Pathetic. Google Finance is sort of OK, and I like how uncluttered it is compared to Yahoo Finance, but Yahoo Finance is actually a serious product, and when you poke around a bit at Google Finance you realize that it's amateur hour in comparison (and I'm a financial amateur!). And games. Never underestimate the power of casual games. Google makes money by crapifying other sites on the Internet, Yahoo makes money by crapifying their own content.
So maybe, with Tumblr, Yahoo is going after the non-Grandma market. I guess that means that we can eventually expect that Tumblr has to bring in revenue, and will start showing more ads. Tumblr seems like it will be somewhat independent, but we'll have to see. What kicked me off of Flickr (a paid account, no less) was the terrible terrible terrible forced Yahoo ID change. I tried a couple times, finally got it right, and promptly completely lost access to my account. Goodbye Flickr, for me. Tumblr is probably a bit stickier than Flickr, but every little thing will chip away at Tumblr's audience. Tumblr is much much more mainstream now than Flickr was when it was bought. So Tumblr's upside for growth by being associated with Yahoo comes mostly from being exposed to an older audience, as the young one is probably pretty saturated for Tumblr right now. Just wait until your Dad gets a Tumblr.
posted by Llama-Lime at 12:24 PM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
And say what you well about the terrible design, cluttered format, and ancient kitchiness of Yahoo sites, (an experience that's vaguely reminiscent of visiting Grandma's houses), but Yahoo actually does their content right. Unlike Google, which is pretty amateur at most things. Google news is good, but Google autos? Hah! Pathetic. Google Finance is sort of OK, and I like how uncluttered it is compared to Yahoo Finance, but Yahoo Finance is actually a serious product, and when you poke around a bit at Google Finance you realize that it's amateur hour in comparison (and I'm a financial amateur!). And games. Never underestimate the power of casual games. Google makes money by crapifying other sites on the Internet, Yahoo makes money by crapifying their own content.
So maybe, with Tumblr, Yahoo is going after the non-Grandma market. I guess that means that we can eventually expect that Tumblr has to bring in revenue, and will start showing more ads. Tumblr seems like it will be somewhat independent, but we'll have to see. What kicked me off of Flickr (a paid account, no less) was the terrible terrible terrible forced Yahoo ID change. I tried a couple times, finally got it right, and promptly completely lost access to my account. Goodbye Flickr, for me. Tumblr is probably a bit stickier than Flickr, but every little thing will chip away at Tumblr's audience. Tumblr is much much more mainstream now than Flickr was when it was bought. So Tumblr's upside for growth by being associated with Yahoo comes mostly from being exposed to an older audience, as the young one is probably pretty saturated for Tumblr right now. Just wait until your Dad gets a Tumblr.
posted by Llama-Lime at 12:24 PM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
why couldnt they buy pinterest instead
wah
posted by elizardbits at 12:28 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
wah
posted by elizardbits at 12:28 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
I just want to share this because it's the best t-shirt I've seen in my entire life
posted by naju at 12:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [24 favorites]
posted by naju at 12:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [24 favorites]
Google makes money by crapifying other sites on the Internet, Yahoo makes money by crapifying their own content.
Flickr? del.icio.us?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:33 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Flickr? del.icio.us?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:33 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I fondly remember when Yahoo appeared, those heady days when they were hiring philosophers (epistemologists) and idealistically imagining that the web could be catalogued and not indexed, and, oh, when they picked a page of mine as a site of the week (literally, "Best of the Web").
I've been using My Yahoo! as my browser homepage and portal to the web (mostly the bookmarks and tracking news stories) for sixteen years. I can't wean myself from it. But they've neglected it, it breaks in weird ways, it's clunky. A couple of years ago they just up and broke the bookmarks entirely, saying it was deprecated and you're SOL, until, apparently, backlash forced them to backtrack.
The mail account I've had for all this time, it's a seven-letter word that's my usual username, and that username has been splattered all over the internet since 1994. So that account has been unusable for me for years and years now, their spam filters can't keep up.
All in all, today's Yahoo is very familiar to me as a tech company that's been limping along for many years on the basis of their former glory, using their assets in increasingly lame attempts to acquire valuable technology while they have zero internal vision or creativity and so even when they do find good acquisitions, it's totally wasted.
It's an old story and I worked at a web software company in the dotcom era that I saw through an IPO and watched it be creative and vital and grow and then to become stale and increasingly irrelevant while it desperately used its market valuation in increasingly speculative acquisitions that moved farther and farther afield from core competence.
These kinds of struggling former giants eat and kill startups, they're black holes that suck in innovation, returning almost nothing but an item on someone's PowerPoint slide crowing about synergy and leverage and positioning for the future.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
I've been using My Yahoo! as my browser homepage and portal to the web (mostly the bookmarks and tracking news stories) for sixteen years. I can't wean myself from it. But they've neglected it, it breaks in weird ways, it's clunky. A couple of years ago they just up and broke the bookmarks entirely, saying it was deprecated and you're SOL, until, apparently, backlash forced them to backtrack.
The mail account I've had for all this time, it's a seven-letter word that's my usual username, and that username has been splattered all over the internet since 1994. So that account has been unusable for me for years and years now, their spam filters can't keep up.
All in all, today's Yahoo is very familiar to me as a tech company that's been limping along for many years on the basis of their former glory, using their assets in increasingly lame attempts to acquire valuable technology while they have zero internal vision or creativity and so even when they do find good acquisitions, it's totally wasted.
It's an old story and I worked at a web software company in the dotcom era that I saw through an IPO and watched it be creative and vital and grow and then to become stale and increasingly irrelevant while it desperately used its market valuation in increasingly speculative acquisitions that moved farther and farther afield from core competence.
These kinds of struggling former giants eat and kill startups, they're black holes that suck in innovation, returning almost nothing but an item on someone's PowerPoint slide crowing about synergy and leverage and positioning for the future.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [9 favorites]
I know this will end in the end of tumblr (or it being of value in any case). Most people here know it as well. And yet billions are being spent to destroy this company. Billions which will duly be registered as a growth in our national GDP. How now can we call capitalism efficient? As compared to what?
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 12:40 PM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 12:40 PM on May 19, 2013 [7 favorites]
Business Week: If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn?
AllThingsD's response, helpful for folks like me who've never used Tumblr:
Why Yahoo Doesn’t Think Tumblr Has a Porn Problem
Tumblr’s core users...log in to the service, and subscribe to different Tumblogs, which they view on a “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s newsfeeds. Not coincidentally, these are also the only people that Tumblr is showing ads to, either via “radar” ads that promote Tumblr pages alongside users’ dashboards, or “spotlight” ads that promote Tumblr pages in a directory of suggested accounts.
To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.
By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.
posted by mediareport at 12:45 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
AllThingsD's response, helpful for folks like me who've never used Tumblr:
Why Yahoo Doesn’t Think Tumblr Has a Porn Problem
Tumblr’s core users...log in to the service, and subscribe to different Tumblogs, which they view on a “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s newsfeeds. Not coincidentally, these are also the only people that Tumblr is showing ads to, either via “radar” ads that promote Tumblr pages alongside users’ dashboards, or “spotlight” ads that promote Tumblr pages in a directory of suggested accounts.
To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.
By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.
posted by mediareport at 12:45 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
How does Tumblr do anything except bleed money? It gets sold, but how does that help the person who paid for it?
posted by thelonius at 12:45 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by thelonius at 12:45 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I know this will end in the end of tumblr (or it being of value in any case). Most people here know it as well. And yet billions are being spent to destroy this company. Billions which will duly be registered as a growth in our national GDP. How now can we call capitalism efficient? As compared to what?
I'm not an unqualified defender of capitalism, but I don't really follow your logic. Without capitalism, Tumblr wouldn't exist in the first place. Were you under the impression that it was coded by volunteers and funded by charitable donations?
posted by pete_22 at 12:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
I'm not an unqualified defender of capitalism, but I don't really follow your logic. Without capitalism, Tumblr wouldn't exist in the first place. Were you under the impression that it was coded by volunteers and funded by charitable donations?
posted by pete_22 at 12:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Yahoo has inventory in the form of ad impressions that they want to sell. Tumblr has a lot of "consumers" for this inventory in the form of their users. This is why buying them helps Yahoo, because they could make zero changes to the service except to change its ad providers and it would help them sell their ad inventory more easily.
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
As I said (on Tumblr) - this whole deal has been so poorly handled from Yahoo's POV. They know there’s a ton of ill will towards them for having bought other popular services in the past and failed to keep them up. They know people won’t forget how Geocities and Pipes and Delicious went, and Flickr’s near demise. And they know we’ve watched other small communities get acquired by large corporations and then lose most of its lustre - Posterous, LiveJournal. They spent 1/3 of their cash reserves to buy a community where much of the userbase actively resents them and a not-insignificant number will leave the platform.
And all they had to do to alleviate a pretty significant chunk of this teeth-gnashing, IMO, was to talk to the users. They could have announced their intention to purchase, and then spent a few days talking about what their plans are. Reassure users that they don’t plan on fucking with their content. Acknowledge their past mistakes, and those of other industry giants—make us understand that they know why this anger and mistrust exists at the grassroots level, and show us that they mean the community no harm. No one likes ads, but I think most people would have accepted that Tumblr would have had to move in that direction sooner rather than later. Sponsored posts were already a thing since the beginning of this year.
It wouldn’t have been easy, they would have still gotten some criticism, but it would be far better than it is now: a deal leaked on a Thursday and sealed on a Sunday, as if they're purposefully avoiding coverage. I mean, were they trying to epitomize their reputation as a monolithic faceless corporation that commoditizes its users and gives no thought to the community experience?
Even if they were scared of Facebook swooping in at the last minute, they've had 72 hours to make their case. But as it is they haven't given any indication that they particularly care what the community thinks. Not that Tumblr was doing so fantastically on that front to begin with, but coming from a company that has a massive PR problem on all sides right now, it seems really really stupid.
I get that companies need to monetize themselves and be profitable, and that start-ups aim to get bought out, and I’m genuinely happy for the Tumblr founders who will now be gajillionnaires. And if this deal revitalizes Yahoo in some way because yay young people, I could even respect that - at least it's more competition for Google/Facebook et al.
But this whole thing was so poorly handled from a marketing standpoint and a community management standpoint that it makes me think Yahoo has learned nothing at all from the past decade...and that is a pretty sad thought.
posted by Phire at 12:53 PM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
And all they had to do to alleviate a pretty significant chunk of this teeth-gnashing, IMO, was to talk to the users. They could have announced their intention to purchase, and then spent a few days talking about what their plans are. Reassure users that they don’t plan on fucking with their content. Acknowledge their past mistakes, and those of other industry giants—make us understand that they know why this anger and mistrust exists at the grassroots level, and show us that they mean the community no harm. No one likes ads, but I think most people would have accepted that Tumblr would have had to move in that direction sooner rather than later. Sponsored posts were already a thing since the beginning of this year.
It wouldn’t have been easy, they would have still gotten some criticism, but it would be far better than it is now: a deal leaked on a Thursday and sealed on a Sunday, as if they're purposefully avoiding coverage. I mean, were they trying to epitomize their reputation as a monolithic faceless corporation that commoditizes its users and gives no thought to the community experience?
Even if they were scared of Facebook swooping in at the last minute, they've had 72 hours to make their case. But as it is they haven't given any indication that they particularly care what the community thinks. Not that Tumblr was doing so fantastically on that front to begin with, but coming from a company that has a massive PR problem on all sides right now, it seems really really stupid.
I get that companies need to monetize themselves and be profitable, and that start-ups aim to get bought out, and I’m genuinely happy for the Tumblr founders who will now be gajillionnaires. And if this deal revitalizes Yahoo in some way because yay young people, I could even respect that - at least it's more competition for Google/Facebook et al.
But this whole thing was so poorly handled from a marketing standpoint and a community management standpoint that it makes me think Yahoo has learned nothing at all from the past decade...and that is a pretty sad thought.
posted by Phire at 12:53 PM on May 19, 2013 [8 favorites]
Yeah, it really just seems like a way to buy a bunch of user accounts attached to the wallets of 18 to 30 year olds. Sort of like Facebook and Instagram, AFAIK.
posted by codacorolla at 12:55 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by codacorolla at 12:55 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm not an unqualified defender of capitalism, but I don't really follow your logic. Without capitalism, Tumblr wouldn't exist in the first place. Were you under the impression that it was coded by volunteers and funded by charitable donations?
There is nothing wrong with paying employees and being rewarded for ones work. But this isn't capitalism, merely commerce. Capitalism is the funding of public companies through the raising of large amounts of capital, the excesses of which are on display here and which, nautiously, I must watch play out over the coming months as as much money is squeezed from tumblr as possible and its' user base leaves.
Further, how much better would companies not only pay their employees but sustainably treat both their business concerns and customers if they weren't just hoping to get a magic buy out lottery ticket from the likes of aging dinosaurs such as Yahoo? We can only speculate at the damage done because we cannot prove the contra positive. Implicit damage is still damage and sadly we are blind to see it.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 12:57 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
There is nothing wrong with paying employees and being rewarded for ones work. But this isn't capitalism, merely commerce. Capitalism is the funding of public companies through the raising of large amounts of capital, the excesses of which are on display here and which, nautiously, I must watch play out over the coming months as as much money is squeezed from tumblr as possible and its' user base leaves.
Further, how much better would companies not only pay their employees but sustainably treat both their business concerns and customers if they weren't just hoping to get a magic buy out lottery ticket from the likes of aging dinosaurs such as Yahoo? We can only speculate at the damage done because we cannot prove the contra positive. Implicit damage is still damage and sadly we are blind to see it.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 12:57 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Without capitalism, Tumblr wouldn't exist in the first place.
So, like, in the Darkest Timeline, Google goes back in time and murders Adam Smith and squashes this emergent threat to G+?
posted by mph at 1:02 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
So, like, in the Darkest Timeline, Google goes back in time and murders Adam Smith and squashes this emergent threat to G+?
posted by mph at 1:02 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
I think it's funny when people talk about Yahoo 'ruining' Flickr. No, guys, you did that when you acted like petulant children when Yahoo had the gall to *gasp* make you use a Yahoo account to sign in.
Granted, Yahoo then did a fine job of doing basically nothing with the property, but that didn't happen until everyone left because apparently Yahoo accounts are evil. (or maybe because Facebook is actually better at what most people used Flickr for)
Now those who dislike Yahoo for nuking Geocities, I can at least understand a little. That was real internet history.
posted by wierdo at 1:05 PM on May 19, 2013
Granted, Yahoo then did a fine job of doing basically nothing with the property, but that didn't happen until everyone left because apparently Yahoo accounts are evil. (or maybe because Facebook is actually better at what most people used Flickr for)
Now those who dislike Yahoo for nuking Geocities, I can at least understand a little. That was real internet history.
posted by wierdo at 1:05 PM on May 19, 2013
All the friends and acquaintances who worked for Yahoo in India were hired when it was still the place to be for idealistic geeks. Once the key local management was replaced with the same kind of clock-watching bean-counters featured in every other IT bodyshop in the country, they all left.
A new CEO is all well and good, but it's going to take more than one person to undo that damage, and it's not clear to me that they even intend to.
posted by vanar sena at 1:08 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
A new CEO is all well and good, but it's going to take more than one person to undo that damage, and it's not clear to me that they even intend to.
posted by vanar sena at 1:08 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
Yeah, what Nelson said. Tumblr had the kind of valuation (however many eyebrows you raise at it) and revenue where it was always going to be an acquisition target, and since we're now apparently long past the days of "old media" spending that amount of money, Y! was the obvious candidate from the web behemoths.
I can't imagine Tumblr being crated up and moved over to the Big Purple Mothership in Sunnyvale, so that's going to be the first test.
They know people won’t forget how Geocities and Pipes and Delicious went, and Flickr’s near demise.
I think you might overestimate the extent of that shared memory of the mid-2000s; on the other hand, the group of people who do remember seem dead-set on not repeating it.
posted by holgate at 1:22 PM on May 19, 2013
I can't imagine Tumblr being crated up and moved over to the Big Purple Mothership in Sunnyvale, so that's going to be the first test.
They know people won’t forget how Geocities and Pipes and Delicious went, and Flickr’s near demise.
I think you might overestimate the extent of that shared memory of the mid-2000s; on the other hand, the group of people who do remember seem dead-set on not repeating it.
posted by holgate at 1:22 PM on May 19, 2013
I just started using Tumblr, and I've been really enjoying it, so it was inevitable that something terrible happen to it. I apologize for spoiling it for everybody else.
Flickr is ghastly (or I just have no idea how it works). There's a menu, and a menu underneath the menu, and a sidebar, and some little widgety things. Eventually you get a picture that's been pushed half-offscreen by all the other crap. If you want to see the picture bigger, you click it three times to get through some different framing schemes until you see 'view all sizes', then click that and pick the size you want. It's like they were unhappy with a single click that means 'show me this picture bigger', so they consulted the Rube Goldberg School Of Web Design...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [16 favorites]
Flickr is ghastly (or I just have no idea how it works). There's a menu, and a menu underneath the menu, and a sidebar, and some little widgety things. Eventually you get a picture that's been pushed half-offscreen by all the other crap. If you want to see the picture bigger, you click it three times to get through some different framing schemes until you see 'view all sizes', then click that and pick the size you want. It's like they were unhappy with a single click that means 'show me this picture bigger', so they consulted the Rube Goldberg School Of Web Design...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [16 favorites]
One thing a Tumblr acquisition can do, at least theoretically, is help to undo the reputation Yahoo has among potential employees as unable to maintain interesting work or value creativity. Having seen what happend to Flickr, Delicious, Fire Eagle, Pipes, the Brickhouse generally, Upcoming and so on and so on, there's a real question about why a high-value hire would want to join Yahoo, or why a promising startup would choose to sell to Yahoo. Yahoo can deal with that in the short term by offering disproportionately large compensation, but that's not a great way to go (and just speeds up the day that your hire leaves, arguably).
The attempt to revive Flickr and retool it for mobile isn't just about the need to have a competitor to Instagram or Facebook photos (the business logic of which is open to argument) - it's a message that the new Yahoo, under Mayer, values invention by aiming to rescue one of old Yahoo's great failures. If it can buy Tumblr and not totally ruin it - or even mange to improve it - and if the entire current staff have not left or been fired within a year, that may have positive consequences for their ability to hire, and the likelihood that other operations might be prepared to sell for perhaps less huge amounts of money.
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
The attempt to revive Flickr and retool it for mobile isn't just about the need to have a competitor to Instagram or Facebook photos (the business logic of which is open to argument) - it's a message that the new Yahoo, under Mayer, values invention by aiming to rescue one of old Yahoo's great failures. If it can buy Tumblr and not totally ruin it - or even mange to improve it - and if the entire current staff have not left or been fired within a year, that may have positive consequences for their ability to hire, and the likelihood that other operations might be prepared to sell for perhaps less huge amounts of money.
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Running order squabble fest
Wouldn't yahoo demonstrate creativity and innovation best by creating and being innovating? Not squandering yet another acquisition, which they will ultimately do anyway, is like saying I'm artistic because I bought a Rembrandt and didn't immediately set it on fire. Although in this case yahoo will draw on the Rembrandt with crayon first (to improve it of course), then set it on fire, lock it inside the house and drive off after throwing the house keys in the lake.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 1:44 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
Wouldn't yahoo demonstrate creativity and innovation best by creating and being innovating? Not squandering yet another acquisition, which they will ultimately do anyway, is like saying I'm artistic because I bought a Rembrandt and didn't immediately set it on fire. Although in this case yahoo will draw on the Rembrandt with crayon first (to improve it of course), then set it on fire, lock it inside the house and drive off after throwing the house keys in the lake.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 1:44 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
Without capitalism, Tumblr wouldn't exist in the first place.
Indeed, we would all be cavepeople without capitalism. Anyone who disagrees might like to move to North Korea.
posted by colie at 1:44 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Indeed, we would all be cavepeople without capitalism. Anyone who disagrees might like to move to North Korea.
posted by colie at 1:44 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Also there is a cat in the house. We are the cat.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 1:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 1:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm probably going to have to stop reading Marco Arment's blog after this. First he'll be like "I really didn't own that much of Tumblr anymore." Then he'll start posting lengthy comparison posts for various yachts while still claiming to be "not that rich." Basically, I'm saying this will probably shift the already-precarious balance of his writing from interesting insights more towards kind-of-a-dick.
posted by stopgap at 2:01 PM on May 19, 2013 [10 favorites]
posted by stopgap at 2:01 PM on May 19, 2013 [10 favorites]
Condé Nast hasn't been bad to reddit, have they?
posted by Apocryphon at 2:02 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Apocryphon at 2:02 PM on May 19, 2013
I dunno, because just you don't know much about Tumblr? I don't really mean that to be snarky, but I never get the "I have never heard of this, therefore it is not relevant and/or a thing most people have heard of."
Exactly my point.
posted by juiceCake at 2:04 PM on May 19, 2013
Exactly my point.
posted by juiceCake at 2:04 PM on May 19, 2013
You've got 9-12 months to sell your startup for a bil.
Well I just got options from AOL, so I'm ready for it.
posted by empath at 2:05 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Well I just got options from AOL, so I'm ready for it.
posted by empath at 2:05 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
They recently got through with the complete destruction of the chat rooms, which they've being accomplishing in stages for years. Yahoo has never found a good property it could not destroy through neglect, meddling, and piss-poor partnerships. I find it the oddest thing, because there are clearly some intelligent people working there, doing interesting things, so I'm willing to completely lay this at the feet of management.
And it isn't as if they couldn't monetize chat rooms; they've charged for other things before. It would kill the spambot problem dead in the water. Instead, they just threw their hands up and turned everything off. Done and done.
My guess is that, unless they can find a way to make Tumblr pay its own way, the same thing will happen. They'll stuff it with ads, make some odd partnerships that almost sort of make sense, stop adding features, and just let the whole thing fade away.
posted by adipocere at 2:05 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
And it isn't as if they couldn't monetize chat rooms; they've charged for other things before. It would kill the spambot problem dead in the water. Instead, they just threw their hands up and turned everything off. Done and done.
My guess is that, unless they can find a way to make Tumblr pay its own way, the same thing will happen. They'll stuff it with ads, make some odd partnerships that almost sort of make sense, stop adding features, and just let the whole thing fade away.
posted by adipocere at 2:05 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Newsday today: Marissa Mayer to unveil updates to Flickr
posted by Wordshore at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Wordshore at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2013
On the plus side if Yahoo! kills Tumblr, at least I won't have to feel old and "not with it" because I still don't get Tumblr.
I used to be "with it", but then they changed what "it" was...
Actually, I was never really "with it". But at least I used to have sort of an idea of why "it" was "it".
Stupid young people.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2013
I used to be "with it", but then they changed what "it" was...
Actually, I was never really "with it". But at least I used to have sort of an idea of why "it" was "it".
Stupid young people.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2013
The news that Yahoo bought Tumblr is less exciting when you learn that Dress Barn bought Yahoo last week.
posted by billyfleetwood at 2:25 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by billyfleetwood at 2:25 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Personally, I think Yahoo! and Tumblr are made for each other, what with their unresponsive management/developers who don't give a flying fuck about what the users want, and never fix bugs or implement features screaming out to be implemented.
Still bitter that Tumblr banned me from my awesome plastic.tumblr.com domain, without warning, because I made too much use of a feature they provided for me to use. then provided no means for me to get it back.
posted by Jimbob at 2:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Still bitter that Tumblr banned me from my awesome plastic.tumblr.com domain, without warning, because I made too much use of a feature they provided for me to use. then provided no means for me to get it back.
posted by Jimbob at 2:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
The Internet will kill everything you love. But by the time it dies, you won’t even care.
posted by Wordshore at 2:37 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Wordshore at 2:37 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
700 million monthly visitors across all of their properties is still a lot of revenue generation, even if they haven't led the way in anything in quite some time.
For example, Yahoo! had $390 million net income for the first quarter of 2013, $272 million for the 4th quarter 2012, and $$3.16 billion for the 3rd quarter 2012.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 2:41 PM on May 19, 2013
For example, Yahoo! had $390 million net income for the first quarter of 2013, $272 million for the 4th quarter 2012, and $$3.16 billion for the 3rd quarter 2012.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 2:41 PM on May 19, 2013
Yahoo is the Walmart of online. They have a little bit of everything and do nothing well. They don't even know what the purpose of their company is except to do anything in the world they can to make cash.
Ah well, it's working I guess. I don't know how, but it is.
posted by Malice at 3:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Ah well, it's working I guess. I don't know how, but it is.
posted by Malice at 3:09 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Yahoo! had $390 million net income for the first quarter of 2013, $272 million for the 4th quarter 2012, and $$3.16 billion for the 3rd quarter 2012.
The majority of income in Q3 2012 was from selling their stake in Alibaba.
posted by xchmp at 3:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
The majority of income in Q3 2012 was from selling their stake in Alibaba.
posted by xchmp at 3:20 PM on May 19, 2013 [4 favorites]
Not all of it, though - which is important because a lot of Yahoo investors don't actually care a lot about what Yahoo does with Yahoo, as long as it retains a decent stake in Alibaba...
Yahoo retains a 23% stake in Alibaba, which is valued at $66-70 million, and might IPO this year for as much as $100 billion - which means that 23% potentially represents a value greater than the entirety of the company that owns it. Alibaba has the option of buying back half of that before the IPO, but it would cost a lot to do so.
Arguably, Terry Semel remains Yahoo's greatest CEO for that one piece of business. Which is pretty weird when you think about it.
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:38 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Yahoo retains a 23% stake in Alibaba, which is valued at $66-70 million, and might IPO this year for as much as $100 billion - which means that 23% potentially represents a value greater than the entirety of the company that owns it. Alibaba has the option of buying back half of that before the IPO, but it would cost a lot to do so.
Arguably, Terry Semel remains Yahoo's greatest CEO for that one piece of business. Which is pretty weird when you think about it.
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:38 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
Looks like nobody has mentioned that Marissa Mayer has done exactly what mathowie has asked for eighteen days ago:
posted by bru at 3:46 PM on May 19, 2013
I really think it's time to try some new wacky ideas on Flickr and perhaps doing something closer to something that looks like blogging, that lets people showcase their work and their prose is a way this could go.Well played, Matt, well played.
posted by bru at 3:46 PM on May 19, 2013
I fondly remember when Yahoo appeared, those heady days when they were hiring philosophers (epistemologists) and idealistically imagining that the web could be catalogued and not indexed, and, oh, when they picked a page of mine as a site of the week (literally, "Best of the Web").
Interestingly, Marissa Mayer did Symbolic Systems and CS at Stanford, and Symbolic Systems is sort of a combination of CS and philosophy. So that may kind of count as hiring a philosopher.
posted by curuinor at 3:47 PM on May 19, 2013
Interestingly, Marissa Mayer did Symbolic Systems and CS at Stanford, and Symbolic Systems is sort of a combination of CS and philosophy. So that may kind of count as hiring a philosopher.
posted by curuinor at 3:47 PM on May 19, 2013
Tumblr has a growing userbase. It has 117 million users. The costs after they amortize the acquisition are about 250-300 million a year. $3-$5/user/year of profit after direct infrastructure and r&d costs seems fairly easy to attain. My understanding is that this is about what they make on email accounts. If they can get that then the revenues would be 300-500 million/year before they expand the user base. That covers the costs and provides a decent return to shareholders. If they can avoid what seem like obvious traps and mistakes eg MySpace; then it seems like they can make this acquisition payoff. I agree it isn't a sure thing; but there is at least an even chance of success.
posted by humanfont at 3:53 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by humanfont at 3:53 PM on May 19, 2013
I have a friend who worked at MySpace. He mentioned that when you figure in the payment Fox received for an exclusive search partnership with Google, Fox actually made out really well with their purchase. Fox paid something like 500 million for MySpace, and got payments from Google that were in the billions.
posted by mullingitover at 3:56 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by mullingitover at 3:56 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
tl,dr;
One time, the creative director told me he liked my tweaked dashboard layout, and said he was "working on a way to get us back to a single column." So I think there is a lot of pressure coming from the top to make a great blogging site.
But in spite of this, they've been doing their best to mess things up with their monetization efforts, with stupid, blinky paid radar features, forcing ads into the timeline on mobile, etc. So its not like Yahoo is going to ruin things, they're already doing their best to do that.
Meanwhile, i'll keep using it as long as people I like hanging out with are there, and when I'm ready to go, I'll just fix my theme and crawl my blog and save the html to keep everything forever.
posted by frijole at 3:57 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
One time, the creative director told me he liked my tweaked dashboard layout, and said he was "working on a way to get us back to a single column." So I think there is a lot of pressure coming from the top to make a great blogging site.
But in spite of this, they've been doing their best to mess things up with their monetization efforts, with stupid, blinky paid radar features, forcing ads into the timeline on mobile, etc. So its not like Yahoo is going to ruin things, they're already doing their best to do that.
Meanwhile, i'll keep using it as long as people I like hanging out with are there, and when I'm ready to go, I'll just fix my theme and crawl my blog and save the html to keep everything forever.
posted by frijole at 3:57 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I sometimes feel like Yahoo! has been chasing me across the internet most of my life, messing up things I happen to really enjoy using. I'm glad I never really got into the Del.icio.us thing before they ruined it.
I also had Yahoo, and then the My Yahoo portal, as my homepage for over a decade. It got to the point where it was unusable; I actually threw together my own HTML file for a homepage (duplicating the function of the old My Yahoo) and used it for years before giving up and having it be Google. Now it's a Chrome extension that shows me a group of snapshots for the sites I told it to; I never even thought about having Yahoo on the list. My mom's the only one in the family who uses it, and she only uses mail and search.
Meanwhile, I use Tumblr in ways that are 1000% incompatible with a public connection to my Yahoo profiles (I have three: my first one was from when they first got started, they gave me a second one when they took over GeoCities and didn't get rid of the account when they killed the sites, and I have a third one from Flickr.) Already performed my backup, just in case. It'll go in the same folder as my GeoCities backups, I guess.
posted by SMPA at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2013
I also had Yahoo, and then the My Yahoo portal, as my homepage for over a decade. It got to the point where it was unusable; I actually threw together my own HTML file for a homepage (duplicating the function of the old My Yahoo) and used it for years before giving up and having it be Google. Now it's a Chrome extension that shows me a group of snapshots for the sites I told it to; I never even thought about having Yahoo on the list. My mom's the only one in the family who uses it, and she only uses mail and search.
Meanwhile, I use Tumblr in ways that are 1000% incompatible with a public connection to my Yahoo profiles (I have three: my first one was from when they first got started, they gave me a second one when they took over GeoCities and didn't get rid of the account when they killed the sites, and I have a third one from Flickr.) Already performed my backup, just in case. It'll go in the same folder as my GeoCities backups, I guess.
posted by SMPA at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2013
I reckon tumblr must be, in aggregrate, the single biggest porn site on the planet. Not sure if that's why Yahoo bought it, though.
I hope, when all said and done, that David gets a nice payout and goes on to other interesting new things, and that Yahoo doesn't kill it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I hope, when all said and done, that David gets a nice payout and goes on to other interesting new things, and that Yahoo doesn't kill it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
stavrosthewonderchicken: The porn thing is very true. I need to send a hug and donation to the guy behind Tumblr Savior, actually; it was Tumblr that finally made me me break down and install a bunch of profanity/keyword filters (more than two decades after I first started using the internet, in the form of BBSes.)
I also in no way think Tumblr as it is now is good (I can think of ten changes they've made in the last two months that I hate.) I'm just absolutely certain Yahoo! will make it even worse, and in ways I can't begin to predict. It's in their nature.
posted by SMPA at 4:30 PM on May 19, 2013
I also in no way think Tumblr as it is now is good (I can think of ten changes they've made in the last two months that I hate.) I'm just absolutely certain Yahoo! will make it even worse, and in ways I can't begin to predict. It's in their nature.
posted by SMPA at 4:30 PM on May 19, 2013
Oh, and if you're like me in terms of pessimism, this is a Mashable thing on backing up your Tumblr content. Took me a very small amount of time using the (extremely old-school) Windows fix; it was a ray of happiness in a weekend of crappy surprises.
posted by SMPA at 4:34 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by SMPA at 4:34 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
> The debacle was how that effort & potential was persistently squandered.
Ah! Very sympathetic. This is in fact the primary reason that I no longer work at Google - even though I got decent performance reviews, almost every project I was on was either intrinsically doggy or actively disliked by senior management (like the original Music Search).
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:36 PM on May 19, 2013
Ah! Very sympathetic. This is in fact the primary reason that I no longer work at Google - even though I got decent performance reviews, almost every project I was on was either intrinsically doggy or actively disliked by senior management (like the original Music Search).
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:36 PM on May 19, 2013
"I actually threw together my own HTML file for a homepage (duplicating the function of the old My Yahoo) and used it for years before giving up and having it be Google."
I started to do that last year sometime. I had the layout partly done, with the bookmarks and then including the RSS feeds of news sources, started to add a calendar, got sidetracked into tweaking the CSS for the presentation of the news feeds, decided I wanted it on my hosted domain so it'd be available to me anywhere, began to worry about an interface for content management, and then decided that this was way too much goddamned work and forgot about it and returned to My Yahoo.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:37 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
I started to do that last year sometime. I had the layout partly done, with the bookmarks and then including the RSS feeds of news sources, started to add a calendar, got sidetracked into tweaking the CSS for the presentation of the news feeds, decided I wanted it on my hosted domain so it'd be available to me anywhere, began to worry about an interface for content management, and then decided that this was way too much goddamned work and forgot about it and returned to My Yahoo.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:37 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Sing Or Swim: "It's like they were unhappy with a single click that means 'show me this picture bigger', so they consulted the Rube Goldberg School Of Web Design..."
I think it's all part of their anti-piracy measures and either ironically or as a bit of programmer subterfuge the site works better without javascript.
posted by Mitheral at 5:21 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I think it's all part of their anti-piracy measures and either ironically or as a bit of programmer subterfuge the site works better without javascript.
posted by Mitheral at 5:21 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm going to LOL so hard when Mayer's big Flickr announcement is that they are sunsetting it immediately.
posted by entropicamericana at 5:36 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by entropicamericana at 5:36 PM on May 19, 2013
How does Tumblr do anything except bleed money? It gets sold, but how does that help the person who paid for it?
This is something i've been wondering since tumblr started gaining popularity. How could you ever generate even enough money to break even running it, without driving all the users away? everyone will run screaming for the hills if their "cool" service starts filling up with ads, and it will become the ghetto described in a rather good hackernews comment from their thread about this, which was linked in the silly web2.0 names fpp:
A business without a proper model, lack of revenue, losing money, fighting off pornography and spammers is worth 1.1 billion in cash to Yahoo. The users will flee, they always do. The engineering dept. will be hired out, it always is. All that Yahoo will have is a domain, a database filled with cats and naked people, and a real problem on its hands.
posted by emptythought at 5:39 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
This is something i've been wondering since tumblr started gaining popularity. How could you ever generate even enough money to break even running it, without driving all the users away? everyone will run screaming for the hills if their "cool" service starts filling up with ads, and it will become the ghetto described in a rather good hackernews comment from their thread about this, which was linked in the silly web2.0 names fpp:
A business without a proper model, lack of revenue, losing money, fighting off pornography and spammers is worth 1.1 billion in cash to Yahoo. The users will flee, they always do. The engineering dept. will be hired out, it always is. All that Yahoo will have is a domain, a database filled with cats and naked people, and a real problem on its hands.
posted by emptythought at 5:39 PM on May 19, 2013 [5 favorites]
As someone who left StumbleUpon™ after eBay bought it and magically transformed it into a steaming pile of clickbait shit, I have nothing but bad feelings towards this sort of M&A.
Looking forward to seeing how Yahoo! decides to "monetize" the "content stream" on Tumblr. In the same way I might look forward to oral surgery or an IRS audit.
posted by the sobsister at 5:43 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Looking forward to seeing how Yahoo! decides to "monetize" the "content stream" on Tumblr. In the same way I might look forward to oral surgery or an IRS audit.
posted by the sobsister at 5:43 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
The yahoo login at Flickr is a PITA, but they really haven't made any other changes that I can see. The site could really use some improvements, but Yahoo's m.o. there seems to be "hands off." Perhaps waiting to see if anything actually happens would be wise before freaking out.
posted by zarq at 5:46 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by zarq at 5:46 PM on May 19, 2013
The changes to Flickr have come in the launch of the mobile app, rather than the web site - although Mayer's big announcement may be about a refresh to the web site functionality, possibly to bring it more in line with the mobile experience...
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:53 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:53 PM on May 19, 2013
Metafiltr has to be worth at least fifty million to Yahoo, right?
Wait has anyone registered "metafiltr.com" yet?
Checks . . .
Drats!
posted by spitbull at 6:16 PM on May 19, 2013
Wait has anyone registered "metafiltr.com" yet?
Checks . . .
Drats!
posted by spitbull at 6:16 PM on May 19, 2013
Dreamwidth: still nonprofit/open-source since 2008!
I forget if invites are required to create an account at the moment, but PM me if you need one.
posted by nicebookrack at 6:17 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I forget if invites are required to create an account at the moment, but PM me if you need one.
posted by nicebookrack at 6:17 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
A friend's daughter had this to say "sigh. Well at least they said they're not making any changes at all, so there's that." If I had had a drink of water in my mouth I would have spit it out all over my screen.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:34 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:34 PM on May 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
zarq: "The yahoo login at Flickr is a PITA, but they really haven't made any other changes that I can see."
They made all sorts of shitty changes over the years. Not the least of which was moving the servers to the US making the files subject directly to US law coupled with undisputed DCMA take downs for non-us users.
posted by Mitheral at 6:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
They made all sorts of shitty changes over the years. Not the least of which was moving the servers to the US making the files subject directly to US law coupled with undisputed DCMA take downs for non-us users.
posted by Mitheral at 6:36 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
I've never had a problem with Flickr. The new login was a pain, sure, but how often do you need to log in? They haven't done much to improve it, but they never did much to wreck it, either. Worse things could have happened to Flickr.
posted by Jimbob at 6:39 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Jimbob at 6:39 PM on May 19, 2013
coupled with undisputed DCMA take downs for non-us users.
Who is posting things to Flickr that would trigger a DCMA takedown? Its for your own photos. Always has been.
posted by Jimbob at 6:40 PM on May 19, 2013
Who is posting things to Flickr that would trigger a DCMA takedown? Its for your own photos. Always has been.
posted by Jimbob at 6:40 PM on May 19, 2013
Let's just say that there isn't any downside for media companies if 3 out of 10 DCMA claims prove to be spurious.
posted by Mitheral at 6:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 6:50 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Who is posting things to Flickr that would trigger a DCMA takedown? Its for your own photos. Always has been.
Well, yeah, but for what it's worth, there's an enormous amount of material on Flickr that isn't user photos -- large communities sharing stuff like old print ads and the like.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:52 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Well, yeah, but for what it's worth, there's an enormous amount of material on Flickr that isn't user photos -- large communities sharing stuff like old print ads and the like.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:52 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
there's an enormous amount of material on Flickr that isn't user photos -- large communities sharing stuff like old print ads and the like.
Which, as it turns out, is what Tumblr is for! That's my main concern - once Yahoo! has the reigns, I'm going to bet there will be closer eyes looking at what exactly is being posted.
posted by Jimbob at 7:07 PM on May 19, 2013
Which, as it turns out, is what Tumblr is for! That's my main concern - once Yahoo! has the reigns, I'm going to bet there will be closer eyes looking at what exactly is being posted.
posted by Jimbob at 7:07 PM on May 19, 2013
"I guess Yahoo really likes the dropped "e" thing."
It's covr for Yahoo's run on o's.
posted by iamkimiam at 7:18 PM on May 19, 2013
It's covr for Yahoo's run on o's.
posted by iamkimiam at 7:18 PM on May 19, 2013
Surely you mean a coovr.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 7:26 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 7:26 PM on May 19, 2013
nicebookrack: I love, love, love Dreamwidth to bits (as in I'm going on a week trip in June to go code on it and hang out with the owners and other volunteers), but it's not nonprofit. It strives for a sustainable business model that's not based on advertising, and it has some rules about where profit goes, but that doesn't mean it's a nonprofit. Very open source, though!
Not too sure about it being a good replacement for people who liked Tumblr, either. Tumblr is great at reblogging/curation, slick UI, and images. Dreamwidth is good at long form text content, content access controls, accessible oriented UI, and deeply threaded comments/discussion. Maybe someday it will be better at some things like images in the future, but when most of your coding comes from volunteers, it can be hard to focus on big features like sleek image hosting. Additionally, features are usually limited for accounts that aren't paid, which can be a real turn off for people.
posted by foxfirefey at 7:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Not too sure about it being a good replacement for people who liked Tumblr, either. Tumblr is great at reblogging/curation, slick UI, and images. Dreamwidth is good at long form text content, content access controls, accessible oriented UI, and deeply threaded comments/discussion. Maybe someday it will be better at some things like images in the future, but when most of your coding comes from volunteers, it can be hard to focus on big features like sleek image hosting. Additionally, features are usually limited for accounts that aren't paid, which can be a real turn off for people.
posted by foxfirefey at 7:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
For camooflag.
posted by iamkimiam at 7:39 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by iamkimiam at 7:39 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Where in the blistering green fuck does an incredibly irrelevant company like Yahoo keep coming up with the money for these huge purchses?
For a second I couldn't remember their url. And I cannot picture their logo.
posted by dobbs at 8:02 PM on May 19, 2013
For a second I couldn't remember their url. And I cannot picture their logo.
posted by dobbs at 8:02 PM on May 19, 2013
I'm still mad about Google killing YouTube. These acquisitions never work out.
Yeah, and Yahoo killing Flickr, and Match killing OKCupid.
posted by John Cohen at 8:12 PM on May 19, 2013
Yeah, and Yahoo killing Flickr, and Match killing OKCupid.
posted by John Cohen at 8:12 PM on May 19, 2013
until the current crop of 14 year old fangirls learn to code
A decent number of those fangirls are learning to code already.
And thanks to all these modern browser features, they're doing clever things with CSS transitions or web fonts. Stuff that a number of corporate developers still either can't use yet or don't know about.
posted by DavidHogue at 9:04 PM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
A decent number of those fangirls are learning to code already.
And thanks to all these modern browser features, they're doing clever things with CSS transitions or web fonts. Stuff that a number of corporate developers still either can't use yet or don't know about.
posted by DavidHogue at 9:04 PM on May 19, 2013 [6 favorites]
The Real Reason Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr: Tumblr’s young demographic doesn’t just ignore Yahoo — they don’t know what it is.
posted by homunculus at 9:25 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by homunculus at 9:25 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
A decent number of those fangirls are learning to code already.
Yep. Me and a friend used to joke around a lot that MySpace, and several other websites before/around that time were the primary way kids our age at the time were learning to code. And especially girls, who otherwise wouldn't learn to code at all.
Similarly, everyone was learning photoshop, and some of these kids were(and are) REALLY good at both.
There's a lot of high school aged kids on tumblr that are near, or with a tiny bit of polishing at pro level with this stuff.
posted by emptythought at 9:42 PM on May 19, 2013
Yep. Me and a friend used to joke around a lot that MySpace, and several other websites before/around that time were the primary way kids our age at the time were learning to code. And especially girls, who otherwise wouldn't learn to code at all.
Similarly, everyone was learning photoshop, and some of these kids were(and are) REALLY good at both.
There's a lot of high school aged kids on tumblr that are near, or with a tiny bit of polishing at pro level with this stuff.
posted by emptythought at 9:42 PM on May 19, 2013
Yahoo's business plan:
- Neglect a new acquisition to death
- ?
- Profit
Oh no! Where am I going to find porn of hipsters and pictures of my favorite bands now? Also, the feels? What about all the feels?
What are feels?
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:25 PM on May 19, 2013
What are feels?
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:25 PM on May 19, 2013
Why not invest a billion in tomorrow instead of yesterday? Lame.
posted by specialk420 at 10:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by specialk420 at 10:26 PM on May 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Occasionally I've tried to encourage my fandom tumblr buddies to toddle over to dreamwidth and establish a bit of a foothold there so everything doesn't fall completely apart when the inevitable occurs. But I find it hard myself to return to "traditional" journaling, particularly when nobody else will follow me to respond and interact, despite my little corner being decidedly more wordy and text-based than seemingly anywhere else on tumblr (other than the RPers).
I'd like to think this will kill the toxic 'fandom' culture, but the end of LiveJournal didn't do that, either. I guess everyone will move to Vine, whatever that is.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:26 PM on May 19, 2013
I'd like to think this will kill the toxic 'fandom' culture, but the end of LiveJournal didn't do that, either. I guess everyone will move to Vine, whatever that is.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:26 PM on May 19, 2013
And thanks to all these modern browser features
There are some pretty powerful features in Chrome's near future. I can only imagine what it would've been like if I had tools like that in the 90s when I was learning this stuff.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
There are some pretty powerful features in Chrome's near future. I can only imagine what it would've been like if I had tools like that in the 90s when I was learning this stuff.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:30 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Condé Nast hasn't been bad to reddit, have they?
They didn't censor even the worst of it, so I guess they were 'good'.
drawings of girls I've seen on Tumblr
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:31 PM on May 19, 2013
They didn't censor even the worst of it, so I guess they were 'good'.
drawings of girls I've seen on Tumblr
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:31 PM on May 19, 2013
Vallywag points out that there's porn and self-harm on Tumblr
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:54 PM on May 19, 2013
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:54 PM on May 19, 2013
In my dreams, I see Yahoo building a Reader clone that incorporates the Tumblr dashboard design. If you build it, I will come.
(So let me know if I need to get some kleenex.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:11 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
(So let me know if I need to get some kleenex.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:11 PM on May 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm hoping 1) this is good for Tumblr but 2) that this spurs some techies with a dream to start up some serious Tumblr competition. The Tumblr experience and interface have been stagnant for so long there are some clear ways to improve on the formula (though of course no certainty that a particular new formula would prove successful).
It's a hard world to consider entering given the huge investment current Tumblr users have in the site, but goddamn it's worth a shot.
At the very least, show me some big thinkers and UX nerds who have put together some think pieces on what Tumblr (or it's successor) can be!
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:20 PM on May 19, 2013
It's a hard world to consider entering given the huge investment current Tumblr users have in the site, but goddamn it's worth a shot.
At the very least, show me some big thinkers and UX nerds who have put together some think pieces on what Tumblr (or it's successor) can be!
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:20 PM on May 19, 2013
Let me rephrase that post:
What comes next within the paradigm that Tumblr has created? Where do the next iterations of the idea come from?
Nobody trusts Yahoo to keep Tumblr alive, let alone foster the kind of thinking/innovation/engineering that Tumblr would need to become it's own true successor (something greater than what came before).
Competition is one of the best drivers of innovation but the perceived impossibility of overcoming the buy-in of Tumblr's millions of members/wankers keeps most from entering the market. So where is this thought leadership* going to come from?
*nose appropriately held while using the term
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:27 PM on May 19, 2013
What comes next within the paradigm that Tumblr has created? Where do the next iterations of the idea come from?
Nobody trusts Yahoo to keep Tumblr alive, let alone foster the kind of thinking/innovation/engineering that Tumblr would need to become it's own true successor (something greater than what came before).
Competition is one of the best drivers of innovation but the perceived impossibility of overcoming the buy-in of Tumblr's millions of members/wankers keeps most from entering the market. So where is this thought leadership* going to come from?
*nose appropriately held while using the term
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:27 PM on May 19, 2013
What comes next within the paradigm that Tumblr has created?
Well, on the blogging side, there's Medium, although this tweet makes a fair point.
What's interesting about Tumblr is that it that it wrapped a CMS and social features and a contemporary aesthetic around a cultural strand that goes back to E/N through Livejournal and perhaps to the plastique.org era.
And you'd assume that the strand will move on to some degree, or perhaps more accurately, will age out and be replaced by 15-year-olds who already think it's a bit lame, but there'll be enough left for Yahoo to deal with for a few years at least. Which takes us back to Wordshore's link.
posted by holgate at 12:14 AM on May 20, 2013
Well, on the blogging side, there's Medium, although this tweet makes a fair point.
What's interesting about Tumblr is that it that it wrapped a CMS and social features and a contemporary aesthetic around a cultural strand that goes back to E/N through Livejournal and perhaps to the plastique.org era.
And you'd assume that the strand will move on to some degree, or perhaps more accurately, will age out and be replaced by 15-year-olds who already think it's a bit lame, but there'll be enough left for Yahoo to deal with for a few years at least. Which takes us back to Wordshore's link.
posted by holgate at 12:14 AM on May 20, 2013
Cool, something that was awesome is going to get cleaned up so it can be safe and lame
fuck all things
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 1:30 AM on May 20, 2013
fuck all things
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 1:30 AM on May 20, 2013
Just got an invite to a Yahoo press event via Flickr. Takes place this evening in NYC. I'm with those of you who are mixed about Yahoo's involvement in Flickr and its potential involvement in Tumblr. I've never gone to one of these events and am curious about it but not sure if it would be interesting or just annoying.
Should I go?
posted by sciencegeek at 3:05 AM on May 20, 2013
Should I go?
posted by sciencegeek at 3:05 AM on May 20, 2013
I wish I understood even a quarter of the jokes on this thread.
posted by zardoz at 3:12 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by zardoz at 3:12 AM on May 20, 2013
Vallywag points out that there's porn and self-harm on Tumblr
Like Yahoo needs more self-harm...
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:33 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
Like Yahoo needs more self-harm...
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:33 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
I wish I understood even a quarter of the jokes on this thread.
I wish I understood even a tenth of the in-jokes across MetaFilter. Only been here a year, though. In time, I guess; in time.
posted by Wordshore at 3:37 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I wish I understood even a tenth of the in-jokes across MetaFilter. Only been here a year, though. In time, I guess; in time.
posted by Wordshore at 3:37 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
sciencegeek: "Just got an invite to a Yahoo press event via Flickr. Takes place this evening in NYC. I'm with those of you who are mixed about Yahoo's involvement in Flickr and its potential involvement in Tumblr. I've never gone to one of these events and am curious about it but not sure if it would be interesting or just annoying.
Should I go?"
Yes, most certainly. Get all the free stuff you can (esp. booze) and report back with news!
posted by barnacles at 5:26 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
Should I go?"
Yes, most certainly. Get all the free stuff you can (esp. booze) and report back with news!
posted by barnacles at 5:26 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.
posted by johnpowell at 5:27 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by johnpowell at 5:27 AM on May 20, 2013
Should I go?
Oh yes. Not just for the timing, but because it's going to be the first live event that really sets out Mayer's vision for Yahoo. Although putting "our promise not to screw it up" in the first sentence of the press release (and keeping Tumblr separate, and presumably in NYC) seems like a pretty positive beginning.
posted by holgate at 5:38 AM on May 20, 2013
Oh yes. Not just for the timing, but because it's going to be the first live event that really sets out Mayer's vision for Yahoo. Although putting "our promise not to screw it up" in the first sentence of the press release (and keeping Tumblr separate, and presumably in NYC) seems like a pretty positive beginning.
posted by holgate at 5:38 AM on May 20, 2013
The acid test will be how they handle the inevitable realization that Tumblr as it exists today will never, ever, ever, ever generate $1.1 billion in revenue.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:47 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:47 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm amazed that press release was approved. It was badly written.
posted by zarq at 5:52 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by zarq at 5:52 AM on May 20, 2013
"The yahoo login at Flickr is a PITA, but they really haven't made any other changes that I can see."
PITA? The yahoo login system is so messed up that I absolutely cannot login to flickr on my android phone. It doesn't matter that I know my password and username and can login to flickr and Yahoo on all my computers. There is somewhere within the yahoo login system some setting I have set once upon a time that renders the android app incapable of logging me in. I can create a new account no problem on my phone. I just can't use my existing account on my phone. I have had about 4 lenghty unclosed tickets with flickr support and they are completely unable to help me. I had about 3500+ photos on flickr and was a pro member pretty much since they had a pro option. But I let all that go, despite really really not wanting to. I quit on Flickr because I can't use my phone upload photos and that is my primary camera. This was right at the moment there was a full media web 2.0 salute for their Mayer and the new and improved iPhone app. I'm sure I am fairly minor edge case with using android and being someone who was around long enough to have merged a flickr account with a yahoo account. Maybe this is only affecting thousands of users. But those are thousands of paying and content producing users that were thrown away by a byzantine yahoo login system that even Yahoo customer support cannot fully troubleshoot.
posted by srboisvert at 5:55 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
PITA? The yahoo login system is so messed up that I absolutely cannot login to flickr on my android phone. It doesn't matter that I know my password and username and can login to flickr and Yahoo on all my computers. There is somewhere within the yahoo login system some setting I have set once upon a time that renders the android app incapable of logging me in. I can create a new account no problem on my phone. I just can't use my existing account on my phone. I have had about 4 lenghty unclosed tickets with flickr support and they are completely unable to help me. I had about 3500+ photos on flickr and was a pro member pretty much since they had a pro option. But I let all that go, despite really really not wanting to. I quit on Flickr because I can't use my phone upload photos and that is my primary camera. This was right at the moment there was a full media web 2.0 salute for their Mayer and the new and improved iPhone app. I'm sure I am fairly minor edge case with using android and being someone who was around long enough to have merged a flickr account with a yahoo account. Maybe this is only affecting thousands of users. But those are thousands of paying and content producing users that were thrown away by a byzantine yahoo login system that even Yahoo customer support cannot fully troubleshoot.
posted by srboisvert at 5:55 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.
Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.
This is precisely how you screw it up. How much of the Tumblr empire is based on curated erotica? Want that linked to your Yahoo identity (if that even works) and shared with corporate partners and advertisers?
posted by srboisvert at 6:00 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.
This is precisely how you screw it up. How much of the Tumblr empire is based on curated erotica? Want that linked to your Yahoo identity (if that even works) and shared with corporate partners and advertisers?
posted by srboisvert at 6:00 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
srboisvert: "PITA?"
*nod*
One person's pain in the ass is another person's migraine headache.
The login system generally works for me on my android phone. It currently works for me on a mac and pc desktop. But it hasn't always worked well on any of those platforms, and my experience with their mobile apps have only just recently improved in the last year. The first couple of incarnations of the flickr app didn't log me properly. Prior to that Flickr didn't work at all on mobile. When they finally got around to offering a mobile stylesheet it was worse than useless. Slow, klunky and imperfect rendering. Links that didn't go anywhere. Etc.
Yahoo's login's also slow as hell. Slower than any other login system I've ever used. I've used their fantasy football app. It runs well. If you're in a Yahoo league then it's a must. But it doesn't have all the features that other apps have.
posted by zarq at 6:20 AM on May 20, 2013
*nod*
One person's pain in the ass is another person's migraine headache.
The login system generally works for me on my android phone. It currently works for me on a mac and pc desktop. But it hasn't always worked well on any of those platforms, and my experience with their mobile apps have only just recently improved in the last year. The first couple of incarnations of the flickr app didn't log me properly. Prior to that Flickr didn't work at all on mobile. When they finally got around to offering a mobile stylesheet it was worse than useless. Slow, klunky and imperfect rendering. Links that didn't go anywhere. Etc.
Yahoo's login's also slow as hell. Slower than any other login system I've ever used. I've used their fantasy football app. It runs well. If you're in a Yahoo league then it's a must. But it doesn't have all the features that other apps have.
posted by zarq at 6:20 AM on May 20, 2013
A statement is up on marissamayr.tumblr.com and yahoo.tumblr.com as well. "We promise not to screw it up." Includes funny animated GIF.
posted by Nelson at 6:21 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by Nelson at 6:21 AM on May 20, 2013
In my dreams, I see Yahoo building a Reader clone that incorporates the Tumblr dashboard design.
It's Yahoo!
They haven't done anything good for users in this millennium. Which is very sad because back in the day when a directory was a useful tool they were the greatest.
posted by bukvich at 6:32 AM on May 20, 2013
It's Yahoo!
They haven't done anything good for users in this millennium. Which is very sad because back in the day when a directory was a useful tool they were the greatest.
posted by bukvich at 6:32 AM on May 20, 2013
"We promise not to screw it up." Includes funny animated GIF.
They neglected to tag it with "seizure warning" so already they are terrible.
posted by elizardbits at 6:35 AM on May 20, 2013
They neglected to tag it with "seizure warning" so already they are terrible.
posted by elizardbits at 6:35 AM on May 20, 2013
Amusement: so I tried to use the RSVP form I was given the link to in my flickr inbox. It asked for an email address. It didn't recognize the yahoo email address linked to my flickr account. I sent an email to the address they provided for registration issues. I also sent mail via flickr to the person who sent me the invite originally. Both replied, but right now yahoo's mail is down. Flickr is up though. The person on flickr who sent me the invite had me manually added to the guest list.
I'm just sitting here giggling.
And now, entertainingly, yahoo's mail is back up and I've been added to the list by the yahoo contact person.
I still have no idea why they'd want me there. I'm distinctly unimportant. I don't really have sway in any demographics - and discussing this here was a total fluke.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:59 AM on May 20, 2013
I'm just sitting here giggling.
And now, entertainingly, yahoo's mail is back up and I've been added to the list by the yahoo contact person.
I still have no idea why they'd want me there. I'm distinctly unimportant. I don't really have sway in any demographics - and discussing this here was a total fluke.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:59 AM on May 20, 2013
I just opened the yahoo homepage for what may very well be the first time this millennium. Then I remembered why I haven't been there since 1998. What a train wreck.
I'm really glad that I never got into tumblr. Yahoo has already killed three sites that I loved: Flickr, stumbleupon and delicious. Email from all three now goes straight to spam. I was a paid member at Flickr. After the fifth time that I got locked out of my account (using the same general-purpose password that I've used since 1995), I decided that Flickr was no longer a safe place to keep my photos. I downloaded all of them and killed my account. They threw away a happy, cash paying subscriber! How do they stay in business?
I wont get into tumblr now because I am oldr and wisr.
posted by double block and bleed at 7:02 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm really glad that I never got into tumblr. Yahoo has already killed three sites that I loved: Flickr, stumbleupon and delicious. Email from all three now goes straight to spam. I was a paid member at Flickr. After the fifth time that I got locked out of my account (using the same general-purpose password that I've used since 1995), I decided that Flickr was no longer a safe place to keep my photos. I downloaded all of them and killed my account. They threw away a happy, cash paying subscriber! How do they stay in business?
I wont get into tumblr now because I am oldr and wisr.
posted by double block and bleed at 7:02 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
foxfirefey: Good point about Dreamwidth not being nonprofit. I think I was confusing it with AO3/Organization for Transformative Works. I still love Dreamwidth, though!
Charlemagne in Sweatpants: "Toxic fandom culture," pfffft, whatever. Internet media fandom isn't going away, and there's an entire rest of the Internet for people not interested.
posted by nicebookrack at 7:25 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Charlemagne in Sweatpants: "Toxic fandom culture," pfffft, whatever. Internet media fandom isn't going away, and there's an entire rest of the Internet for people not interested.
posted by nicebookrack at 7:25 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
"A statement is up on marissamayr.tumblr.com and yahoo.tumblr.com as well. "We promise not to screw it up." Includes funny animated GIF."
Disappointed it wasn't this.
Tumblr's pretty cool. There are some wonderfully weird artists on it, like notalkingplz, and I have recently fallen in love with several science blogs like fuckyeahfluiddynamics and the science llama (SEE ALSO: brookhavenlab, mathmajorprobs, lookatthesefuckinstars, galaxyshmalaxy). There are neat blogs that meld the two, like geometrydaily. And hey, there's even bestofmefi.
Plus some sublimely funny things like windows95tips (SEE ALSO: screenshotsofdespair). Also, I have like 4or 5 tumblogs... not self-promoting so much as if you've ever been followed by or got a like from one of these and you were like "who tf is that?" NOW YOU KNOW.
So yeah, it's a lot more than just fandom, feels, and porn.
posted by Eideteker at 7:28 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
Disappointed it wasn't this.
Tumblr's pretty cool. There are some wonderfully weird artists on it, like notalkingplz, and I have recently fallen in love with several science blogs like fuckyeahfluiddynamics and the science llama (SEE ALSO: brookhavenlab, mathmajorprobs, lookatthesefuckinstars, galaxyshmalaxy). There are neat blogs that meld the two, like geometrydaily. And hey, there's even bestofmefi.
Plus some sublimely funny things like windows95tips (SEE ALSO: screenshotsofdespair). Also, I have like 4or 5 tumblogs... not self-promoting so much as if you've ever been followed by or got a like from one of these and you were like "who tf is that?" NOW YOU KNOW.
So yeah, it's a lot more than just fandom, feels, and porn.
posted by Eideteker at 7:28 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
the inevitable realization that Tumblr as it exists today will never, ever, ever, ever generate $1.1 billion in revenue.
That's probably not the way to think about it. It keeps Yahoo relevant, adds a big chunk of users to the marketing pool, and that's probably more value than a strict revenue number for Tumblr as a discrete entity.
More to the point: Tumblr already had $125m in VC funding. It had a $25m/year burn rate, and ~150 staff, and while it didn't really have its own servers to manage, I'm sure a lot of that was going to Amazon. Not many ways of paying back that amount of money (with interest) without hooking up with a bigger company with pre-existing ad/marketing infrastructure.
posted by holgate at 7:41 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
That's probably not the way to think about it. It keeps Yahoo relevant, adds a big chunk of users to the marketing pool, and that's probably more value than a strict revenue number for Tumblr as a discrete entity.
More to the point: Tumblr already had $125m in VC funding. It had a $25m/year burn rate, and ~150 staff, and while it didn't really have its own servers to manage, I'm sure a lot of that was going to Amazon. Not many ways of paying back that amount of money (with interest) without hooking up with a bigger company with pre-existing ad/marketing infrastructure.
posted by holgate at 7:41 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Flashback: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet, by Metafilter's own emptyage. It's a new article and contains lots of details and quotes form insiders on specifically how that acquisition failed. I'd known the broad story before but not so much specifics, really interesting.
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
From that Flashback article:
"Butterfield and Fake were old-school Web types. The kind with low Metafilter user numbers and WELL accounts."
posted by Wordshore at 8:19 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
"Butterfield and Fake were old-school Web types. The kind with low Metafilter user numbers and WELL accounts."
posted by Wordshore at 8:19 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Oh no! Where am I going to find porn of hipsters and pictures of my favorite bands now?
Sincerely: What do you like?
posted by shakespeherian at 8:22 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
Sincerely: What do you like?
posted by shakespeherian at 8:22 AM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
You've probably never heard of it, shakes.
posted by elizardbits at 8:34 AM on May 20, 2013 [6 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 8:34 AM on May 20, 2013 [6 favorites]
Like many writers covering Flickr's history, Mat Honan glosses over its pre-Yahoo days. Its main interface was a big Flash shoeboxy application for sharing, with the web interface as a fallback. (An interface that sorta kinda came back with Glitch.) Somewhat like Twitter early on, a lot of people signed up on launch, played around with it, and slowly drifted away, then came back a few months later to see that the web interface was now the public face of the service, and that's when its growth exploded. Oh, and it was pretty much one year from launch to acquisition, both done at O'Reilly's Etech. (Yeah, I was there.)
Anyway, the stuff about Yahoo's suffocating culture of managers, under-managers and over-managers is familiar to me from people who suffered under it, although not the specifics about CorpDev and mobile. Just as AOL had done in the late 90s, they hired or acquired a lot of the people with most clue about the direction of the web: the Flickr team, Oddpost, Andy Baio, Joshua Schachter, later Brickhouse hires like Tom Coates. And squandered it.
What's different this time, I suppose, is that Yahoo has been told for the past five years how badly it fucked up. And its boss, having risen with Google during that decade, doesn't really need telling.
posted by holgate at 8:54 AM on May 20, 2013
Anyway, the stuff about Yahoo's suffocating culture of managers, under-managers and over-managers is familiar to me from people who suffered under it, although not the specifics about CorpDev and mobile. Just as AOL had done in the late 90s, they hired or acquired a lot of the people with most clue about the direction of the web: the Flickr team, Oddpost, Andy Baio, Joshua Schachter, later Brickhouse hires like Tom Coates. And squandered it.
What's different this time, I suppose, is that Yahoo has been told for the past five years how badly it fucked up. And its boss, having risen with Google during that decade, doesn't really need telling.
posted by holgate at 8:54 AM on May 20, 2013
I'm curious as to how Yahoo could have ruined Stumbleupon, as they don't have anything to do with one another. Maybe you're thinking of some other Internet company, which did own them briefly.
posted by feckless at 10:54 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by feckless at 10:54 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I also realized something interesting just this moment... Why is no one really comparing this to news corp buying MySpace? Because its more like that than anything else I can possibly think of.
It's like buying a pint of ice cream and no fridge. Remember how that ended? The whole "your favorite site will die, but you won't care" link above is spot on.
posted by emptythought at 11:29 AM on May 20, 2013
It's like buying a pint of ice cream and no fridge. Remember how that ended? The whole "your favorite site will die, but you won't care" link above is spot on.
posted by emptythought at 11:29 AM on May 20, 2013
Nelson: that article is from last year, and since it was republished because of the Tumblr acquisition, Flickr did address one big thing Mat Honan complained loudly about: its mobile app. It's more streamlined and has effects, filters, etc. It's rocketed up from 64th place in free photo apps to... 48th. Maybe it was too late, as he asked in the article.
posted by zsazsa at 11:48 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by zsazsa at 11:48 AM on May 20, 2013
Thanks zsazsa, you're right, here's the May 2012 version of the article. Gizmodo tricked me. Still, it's a good article. And I was puzzled about the mobile app discrepancy. What a sad thought, that it's simply too late. OTOH I still use Flickr, just used it yesterday.
posted by Nelson at 11:51 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by Nelson at 11:51 AM on May 20, 2013
which was a nifty search engine when I first encountered it in 1995
They used to have a print magazine too, at some point!
posted by Melismata at 11:56 AM on May 20, 2013
They used to have a print magazine too, at some point!
posted by Melismata at 11:56 AM on May 20, 2013
Okay, I'm gonna go write some Yahoo-eating-Tumblr vore slash. That's the proper response to this, right?
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
Man if Hannibal doesn't get picked up AND Yahoo ruins Tumblr then there going to be a lot of angry people who have spent hours watching people lovingly turned into meals with a lot of free time on their hands.
posted by The Whelk at 12:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 12:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
Well, here's a thing for you folks worrying about Yahoo!'s ability to run Tumblr.
posted by Samizdata at 1:21 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Samizdata at 1:21 PM on May 20, 2013
srboisvert: ""The yahoo login at Flickr is a PITA, but they really haven't made any other changes that I can see."
PITA? The yahoo login system is so messed up that I absolutely cannot login to flickr on my android phone. It doesn't matter that I know my password and username and can login to flickr and Yahoo on all my computers. There is somewhere within the yahoo login system some setting I have set once upon a time that renders the android app incapable of logging me in. I can create a new account no problem on my phone. I just can't use my existing account on my phone. I have had about 4 lenghty unclosed tickets with flickr support and they are completely unable to help me. I had about 3500+ photos on flickr and was a pro member pretty much since they had a pro option. But I let all that go, despite really really not wanting to. I quit on Flickr because I can't use my phone upload photos and that is my primary camera. This was right at the moment there was a full media web 2.0 salute for their Mayer and the new and improved iPhone app. I'm sure I am fairly minor edge case with using android and being someone who was around long enough to have merged a flickr account with a yahoo account. Maybe this is only affecting thousands of users. But those are thousands of paying and content producing users that were thrown away by a byzantine yahoo login system that even Yahoo customer support cannot fully troubleshoot."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAH!
Years ago, I got pissed off at the Yahoo login system when I could not reset a password and lost an accout, so I created the Yahoo ID I still use -
Wait for it....
Wait for it...
bloodypita
Seriously.
posted by Samizdata at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
PITA? The yahoo login system is so messed up that I absolutely cannot login to flickr on my android phone. It doesn't matter that I know my password and username and can login to flickr and Yahoo on all my computers. There is somewhere within the yahoo login system some setting I have set once upon a time that renders the android app incapable of logging me in. I can create a new account no problem on my phone. I just can't use my existing account on my phone. I have had about 4 lenghty unclosed tickets with flickr support and they are completely unable to help me. I had about 3500+ photos on flickr and was a pro member pretty much since they had a pro option. But I let all that go, despite really really not wanting to. I quit on Flickr because I can't use my phone upload photos and that is my primary camera. This was right at the moment there was a full media web 2.0 salute for their Mayer and the new and improved iPhone app. I'm sure I am fairly minor edge case with using android and being someone who was around long enough to have merged a flickr account with a yahoo account. Maybe this is only affecting thousands of users. But those are thousands of paying and content producing users that were thrown away by a byzantine yahoo login system that even Yahoo customer support cannot fully troubleshoot."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAH!
Years ago, I got pissed off at the Yahoo login system when I could not reset a password and lost an accout, so I created the Yahoo ID I still use -
Wait for it....
Wait for it...
bloodypita
Seriously.
posted by Samizdata at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
OK. I found one useful thing today on Yahoo. I've been wanting to move away from Gmail for a while so I signed up today for a Yahoo email account*. The interface looks nice, though I'll never use that.
The weird thing is that they want to charge something like $20 a year for POP access but I was able to connect with Thunderbird via IMAP for free. Thunderbird already knew the IMAP and SMTP settings. Easy peasy. But why charge for POP when IMAP is better and free? Why not charge for both, if paid premium email is how they make a profit?**
I still don't understand how they stay in business.
* - I'm still not sure if I want to send my email from an @yahoo.com address. Is that too much like grandpa472@aol.com?
** - Not that I'm complaining
posted by double block and bleed at 1:39 PM on May 20, 2013
The weird thing is that they want to charge something like $20 a year for POP access but I was able to connect with Thunderbird via IMAP for free. Thunderbird already knew the IMAP and SMTP settings. Easy peasy. But why charge for POP when IMAP is better and free? Why not charge for both, if paid premium email is how they make a profit?**
I still don't understand how they stay in business.
* - I'm still not sure if I want to send my email from an @yahoo.com address. Is that too much like grandpa472@aol.com?
** - Not that I'm complaining
posted by double block and bleed at 1:39 PM on May 20, 2013
I think you can use "ymail.com" instead now.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:44 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:44 PM on May 20, 2013
But why charge for POP when IMAP is better and free?
POP takes the email data away from them. You are paying to own your own data (and also to take responsibility for your own backups). With IMAP, the data stays on their servers and they can serve you ads against it. (I'm assuming this is classic POP where the messages are deleted from the server after download.)
posted by stopgap at 1:57 PM on May 20, 2013
POP takes the email data away from them. You are paying to own your own data (and also to take responsibility for your own backups). With IMAP, the data stays on their servers and they can serve you ads against it. (I'm assuming this is classic POP where the messages are deleted from the server after download.)
posted by stopgap at 1:57 PM on May 20, 2013
I'm going to LOL so hard when Mayer's big Flickr announcement is that they are sunsetting it immediately.
If you want to laugh tonight, you might want to rent a good comedy. That's all I'm going to say.
posted by davejay at 2:31 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
If you want to laugh tonight, you might want to rent a good comedy. That's all I'm going to say.
posted by davejay at 2:31 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
Holy crap, a free terabyte of storage? Yeesh, I wish that had been around back when I was a photojournalist.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:40 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:40 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Um, if you have a Flickr account, have you looked at it today...
posted by Wordshore at 2:41 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Wordshore at 2:41 PM on May 20, 2013
If you want to laugh tonight, you might want to rent a good comedy. That's all I'm going to say.
Still no iPad app; not impressed.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:45 PM on May 20, 2013
Still no iPad app; not impressed.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:45 PM on May 20, 2013
Coo, Flickr is looking nice.
I assume everybody is outraged?
posted by Artw at 2:47 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I assume everybody is outraged?
posted by Artw at 2:47 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
I am outraged re: the abovementioned lack of time travel.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:50 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:50 PM on May 20, 2013
1TB free?! Yikes.
posted by octothorpe at 2:52 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by octothorpe at 2:52 PM on May 20, 2013
I think you can use "ymail.com" instead now.
Do they have a spam filter that works now?
Also, do they delete all your mail if they don't see you every two months?
Because that's one lesson I got from them in relying on third party providers of services.
posted by weston at 3:03 PM on May 20, 2013
Do they have a spam filter that works now?
Also, do they delete all your mail if they don't see you every two months?
Because that's one lesson I got from them in relying on third party providers of services.
posted by weston at 3:03 PM on May 20, 2013
Apparently the change to 1TB ate the old sets that had been hidden after I let my Pro membership expire.
posted by Memo at 3:04 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Memo at 3:04 PM on May 20, 2013
Marco Arment, Tumblr's first employee, posted a really sweet reminiscence about the early days at Tumblr and his respect for David Karp.
posted by Nelson at 3:05 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Nelson at 3:05 PM on May 20, 2013
stopgap: "(I'm assuming this is classic POP where the messages are deleted from the server after download.)"
I'm curious why anyone would do that if the POP server gave them the option of storing. The latter is what I do with gmail. My messages download into thunderbird where I can manage them in a real mail app but when I need to reference an email on the web they are available through googles always changing for the worst web interface (latest trick I see is not labeling the input fields on the compose window. What the heck is the "brilliant" idea behind that?)
Plus if my backups ever get screwed up I've still got copies of all my mail for the last 10 years in gmail.
posted by Mitheral at 4:39 PM on May 20, 2013
I'm curious why anyone would do that if the POP server gave them the option of storing. The latter is what I do with gmail. My messages download into thunderbird where I can manage them in a real mail app but when I need to reference an email on the web they are available through googles always changing for the worst web interface (latest trick I see is not labeling the input fields on the compose window. What the heck is the "brilliant" idea behind that?)
Plus if my backups ever get screwed up I've still got copies of all my mail for the last 10 years in gmail.
posted by Mitheral at 4:39 PM on May 20, 2013
Coo, Flickr is looking nice. I assume everybody is outraged?
There's25 31 pages and counting of "why wasn't I consulted?" on the forums. Flickr staff say it was 6-8 weeks from prototype to launch, and there are some really rough edges: it's been a while since I've had that sense of rushed QA and "oh fuck it, we're out of time" to a big website UI. There's an impassivity to it right now, a kind of 2001 monolithic feel, and a backgrounding of the microsocial stuff of titles and descriptions and tags and comments. But I'll see how it gets tweaked further before passing judgement.
Marco Arment, Tumblr's first employee, posted a really sweet reminiscence about the early days at Tumblr and his respect for David Karp.
The biggest surprise as news of the deal leaked was that Tumblr employed 150 people. Because Tumblr? That's just the one young guy, isn't it? Him and Marco, but Marco left. And while clearly there's a big support and dev staff, it feels very different from a company like Etsy: a kind of autocracy presiding over anarchy, not that unlike moot with 4chan.
posted by holgate at 5:08 PM on May 20, 2013
There's
Marco Arment, Tumblr's first employee, posted a really sweet reminiscence about the early days at Tumblr and his respect for David Karp.
The biggest surprise as news of the deal leaked was that Tumblr employed 150 people. Because Tumblr? That's just the one young guy, isn't it? Him and Marco, but Marco left. And while clearly there's a big support and dev staff, it feels very different from a company like Etsy: a kind of autocracy presiding over anarchy, not that unlike moot with 4chan.
posted by holgate at 5:08 PM on May 20, 2013
Oh no! Where am I going to find porn of hipsters and pictures of my favorite bands now?
Sincerely: What do you like?
Luckily, its all on Tumblr!
Fuck Yeah Dark Souls
Fuck Yeah The Mountain Goats
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:27 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Sincerely: What do you like?
Luckily, its all on Tumblr!
Fuck Yeah Dark Souls
Fuck Yeah The Mountain Goats
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:27 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
The FPP on the flickr changes didn't seem to be linked from here yet.
posted by jepler at 5:38 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by jepler at 5:38 PM on May 20, 2013
Well, that was an interesting little junket.
posted by sciencegeek at 5:41 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by sciencegeek at 5:41 PM on May 20, 2013
I assume everybody is outraged?
That's my secret, ArtW. I'm always outraged.
posted by elizardbits at 5:47 PM on May 20, 2013 [7 favorites]
That's my secret, ArtW. I'm always outraged.
posted by elizardbits at 5:47 PM on May 20, 2013 [7 favorites]
[unruly roaring]
posted by elizardbits at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by elizardbits at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2013
You're such a good listener, elizardbits, did anyone ever tell you that?
posted by nicebookrack at 5:50 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by nicebookrack at 5:50 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]
Oh no! Where am I going to find porn of hipsters and pictures of my favorite bands now? Also, the feels? What about all the feels
Ah I see you read fuckyeahboringthreadshittingfromaboringnincompoop dot tumblr dot com too.
posted by codacorolla at 6:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Ah I see you read fuckyeahboringthreadshittingfromaboringnincompoop dot tumblr dot com too.
posted by codacorolla at 6:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
"Man if Hannibal doesn't get picked up AND Yahoo ruins Tumblr then there going to be a lot of angry people who have spent hours watching people lovingly turned into meals with a lot of free time on their hands."
"no matter how ugly you think you are, always remember—Hannibal could probably make an absolutely beautiful dish out of you."
posted by Eideteker at 7:04 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
"no matter how ugly you think you are, always remember—Hannibal could probably make an absolutely beautiful dish out of you."
posted by Eideteker at 7:04 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
My god, that mailing-stuff-to-TV-execs renewal campaign would be terrifyingly amazing.
posted by nicebookrack at 7:32 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by nicebookrack at 7:32 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
Still no iPad app; not impressed.
Hatr, Now with 1TB of storage for all your hate.
posted by davejay at 7:58 PM on May 20, 2013
Hatr, Now with 1TB of storage for all your hate.
posted by davejay at 7:58 PM on May 20, 2013
if Hannibal doesn't get picked up
Wait the what now? I'd just been assuming that it was successful and now I have to play the will-they-or-won't-they game? Gah.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:44 PM on May 20, 2013
Wait the what now? I'd just been assuming that it was successful and now I have to play the will-they-or-won't-they game? Gah.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:44 PM on May 20, 2013
THEY ARE TOYING WITH US AND IT IS A GRAVE ERROR because hi we are a bunch of people who have been watching a how-to on serial killing combined with a cooking show and giffing it in comic sans
posted by elizardbits at 8:49 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by elizardbits at 8:49 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]
I'm still miffed that Threshold got canned. PETER FUCKING DINKLAGE for crying out loud.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:53 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:53 PM on May 20, 2013
‘Hannibal’ Likely To Survive For Another Season: Even if NBC doesn’t renew “Hannibal,” Amazon and at least one cable network are interested in picking it up.
posted by homunculus at 9:00 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by homunculus at 9:00 PM on May 20, 2013
"...there’s no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers..."
posted by brundlefly at 12:41 PM on May 21, 2013
posted by brundlefly at 12:41 PM on May 21, 2013
That feels like a strangely hostile response given that Mayer was fairly obviously trying to make a point about data storage...
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:39 PM on May 21, 2013
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:39 PM on May 21, 2013
Breakdown of who from Tumblr gets how much of the $1.1B. (via Hacker News.) They're citing research from PrivCo. The breakdown: $780M to venture capitalists, $250M to the founder David Karp, $66M to employees. The other report has $220M going to employees. All of this is informed speculation and may or may not be accurate.
posted by Nelson at 3:46 PM on May 21, 2013
posted by Nelson at 3:46 PM on May 21, 2013
All of this is informed speculation
Even that might be too much for financial journalists. Someone with a passing familiarity with the field would realize that not all employees have had their stock vest yet, so it's not like people who showed up last week are getting 371k. But you, details aren't for the people writing these articles.
posted by allen.spaulding at 10:37 AM on May 22, 2013
Even that might be too much for financial journalists. Someone with a passing familiarity with the field would realize that not all employees have had their stock vest yet, so it's not like people who showed up last week are getting 371k. But you, details aren't for the people writing these articles.
posted by allen.spaulding at 10:37 AM on May 22, 2013
Mitheral: "stopgap: "(I'm assuming this is classic POP where the messages are deleted from the server after download.)"
I'm curious why anyone would do that if the POP server gave them the option of storing. The latter is what I do with gmail. My messages download into thunderbird where I can manage them in a real mail app but when I need to reference an email on the web they are available through googles always changing for the worst web interface (latest trick I see is not labeling the input fields on the compose window. What the heck is the "brilliant" idea behind that?)
Plus if my backups ever get screwed up I've still got copies of all my mail for the last 10 years in gmail."
Say, are we talking Windows or Linux here?
posted by Samizdata at 11:01 PM on May 22, 2013
I'm curious why anyone would do that if the POP server gave them the option of storing. The latter is what I do with gmail. My messages download into thunderbird where I can manage them in a real mail app but when I need to reference an email on the web they are available through googles always changing for the worst web interface (latest trick I see is not labeling the input fields on the compose window. What the heck is the "brilliant" idea behind that?)
Plus if my backups ever get screwed up I've still got copies of all my mail for the last 10 years in gmail."
Say, are we talking Windows or Linux here?
posted by Samizdata at 11:01 PM on May 22, 2013
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posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:18 AM on May 19, 2013 [41 favorites]