I’m on my way to Germany today, so it’s timely that I come across this post on the development seed blog:
This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.
To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.
I am also heartily against censorship, and join the ranks of the noisy Germans in calling for an end to censorship on Flickr. May Yahoo respond quickly and find it in their hearts to reverse this decision!
This incident is a reminder also that we need to keep in mind that Flickr and other powerful Web 2.0 sites are not merely appliances that we can expect to continue using forever as we are using them today. Just yesterday I went looking for a tool to retrieve some of my favorite flickr photosets to copy onto my brand spanking new Sansa e250 mp3 player, and found that it was tricky to do so. Indeed Flickr does not offer a simple way to do it and you have to use a 3rd party tool that takes advantage of Flickr’s API.
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