And then poor old flickr decided there was nothing else left but to roll over and play dead.
source // click image to enlarge
Yes finally under the colossal weight of a incomplete and poorly executed redesign, HTML5 had a meeting with CSS3, jumped into jQuery’s smart new convertible – who’d thoughtfully left the engine running since Monday – and fucked off to the beach.
One has to feel some sympathy for the technical staff at flickr HQ who presumably were forced against their better judgement into rolling out a site that was incomplete and unstable. Just look at their poor solemn faces at Monday’s launch ‘party’.
source // click image to enlarge
So, despite claims from flickr to be ‘aware of the problem’ and moreover to be ‘fixing it’, the site is now in worse shape one week into the relaunch.
Why Is This Happening?
Flickr’s claim to be ‘listening’ is as erroneous as its ‘Awesome’ relaunch that struck users unannounced on Monday and subsequently brought the entire site to a grinding halt on Thursday. By far one of the biggest problems for all users is pages that take an age to load or do not load at all.
The problem centres around a poorly thought out redesign that attempts to display too many hi-resolution images at one time coupled with a continually scrolling page, so that the process never really catches up with itself leaving partial loading pages with blank placeholders or a completely empty page, or in some cases a page that attempts to reload itself over and over again when scrolled up or down.
source // click image to enlarge
As state of the art goes, this is an abject lesson in Unresponsive Web Design, in How Not To Design A Photo Sharing Website, and beggars belief how it ever got rolled out to a mass audience. A rookie mistake if ever their was one and one in which yahoo and flickr are certain to pay heavily in lost users, not to mention their true concern, revenue.
The solution, in technical terms is obvious and straightforward, but regrettably for all concerned it’s one that a stubborn and inflexible new CEO will not allow.
As frustrated and disgruntled users continue to complain in their thousands shareholders ought to be very concerned.
UPDATE: Yahoo Design Chief Quits. ~ Senior vice president of Yahoo’s User Experience Design department, Tim Parsey, has decided to leave the company.
domestic empire 
What’s the betting all the complaint comments will have been ‘lost’ when the site comes back online?
Yes it does appear that a number of threads have been deleted by flickr employees, notably one petition simply asking for a return to the ‘old flickr’ style which had in excess of 3,000 signatories.
Ruined the best part of my day…..coffee in the morning with my Flickr Family and friends!!!!!
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Flickr has cooked its own goose and lost the golden egg it had as this last big change is a flop.
Have been a happy camper since 2007 but not anymore.
I am enjoying my new place at Ipernity to show my photos and talk to the many friends that have come over from the un-improved Flickr.
Ditto for me – they’re really dropped a clanger here. I, along with loads of others, will not be renewing my subscription. It is slow as hell, unresponsive to clicks on the “recent activity” button, reloads the whole page of pics every time you hit “back” after looking at a pic. It’s bloody awful.
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