Why trust?
The Flickr Flap has reached the BBC. The Flickr community feels itself to be real, and some of its members resent having to use [free] Yahoo! IDs. They're Flickr members, not Yahoo! corporate shills.
The real problem, and the reason for the flap, is an essential mistrust of Yahoo!. Yahoo! bought Flickr and owns the servers that house it. So far, zip has happened to change Flickr's operations because of the Yahoo! purchase. It would just make it easier to coordinate across the entire Yahoo! network (Yahoo! says) if everyone was logging in using the same system.
Flickr users might be saying: “Yahoo! acts well now, but how can anyone predict how they will act in the future? If Yahoo! is a content provider, won't they be in the business of somehow packaging and selling our content?”
Google is having similar trust issues. Sure, we like Google now, but why should we trust the Google of five years from now with such deeply detailed information about our online lives?
Both Google and Yahoo! have to persuade online communities of two key things: (1) “they” are “us” — they understand the value of user-generated online environments, and wouldn't try to sell them back to us, and (2) their DNA is already in place, is trustworthy, and is held dear from the top to the bottom of the company. It's a hard problem. Avoiding missteps is a crucial part of solving it, but it's hard to predict in advance which particular moves will be viewed as missteps.
All trust is created through repeat interactions that involve some risks on both sides. Maybe the Flickr Flap should be seen as a step that involves some risk. If it goes the right way for Flickr, Yahoo! should be trusted just that much more. If it doesn't, the Flickr community can make noise and many people will be listening. Dropping out of Flickr in a symbolic “mass suicide” seems shortsighted.
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