Anonymous asked: Tumblr runs fine, is managed nearly invisibly, and there is little user complaint about its usability. There is nothing present or impending to save tumblr from. It doesn’t even crash any more. So where is the comparison between flickr, which needed saving, and tumblr, which already functions properly and requires little change?

I’m not saying that Tumblr needs saving; all I’m saying is that being acquired by Yahoo doesn’t mean Tumblr will get ruined.

But I guess the root of your question is: if they don’t need saving, why are they getting acquired? And I think the answer is because $1.1 billion is a lot of money, and investors like getting their money back sooner from an acquisition than later from the slow climb to profitability.

I am super bored of hearing this.

Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.

In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the world’s biggest photo-sharing site, and tagged photos was key to its early growth, something Flickr didn’t add until 2007)

But that’s in retrospect. In 2005, it wasn’t at all clear what to do. Everyone in the industry was still feeling the burn of gigantic, unprofitable acquisitions prior to the great crash of 2001, so paying money for an barely-profitable site like Flickr still seemed like madness, even within Yahoo. So Yahoo focussed on making it profitable — and succeeded, which is no mean feat.

Could Flickr have done better staying independent? Absolutely no way.

And the way you can tell that for sure is that they let Yahoo acquire them. It’s not like Yahoo in 2005 had a great reputation; the only reason you’d do it is if you were out of money and out of options. In 2005, nobody was going to give Flickr the hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital they needed and hope for the best: it was exit or die.

On top of the bare financial reality, it is an open secret at Yahoo (my former employer) that Flickr’s internals are and have always been an architectural nightmare. They had no idea how to scale and needed huge investment just to dig themselves out of the technical debt they’d accrued. It could have been better, sure, but without Yahoo it would have been much, much worse.

Yahoo didn’t kill Flickr; Yahoo saved Flickr from itself.

I for one welcome our new Yahoo overlords.

Ending six decades of nearly-continuous increases, this is good news for everybody.

azspot:

Challenging the Myth That Guns Stop Crime

There was a 1970s version and also a 1990s version that was on Nickelodeon; it will be interesting to see which the new version is closest to.

DeadDrop was nearly ready to launch when Aaron committed suicide, which understandably delayed things.

If anyone can pull of a science fiction TV show that will be awesome for one season and then get cancelled, it’s Joss Whedon.

I can’t imagine what possible ROI one would expect on spending this amount of money, unless it was to get a lot of attention from the bidding process itself — and the winner is currently anonymous.