A Hewlett Packard service called MagCloud lets you create and print a magazine online over the internet for about 20 cents per page. Powazek, Time magazine reports, made innovative use of the service, publishing a photo magazine about the storm within 48 hours of the event. Powazek drew on the work of about 70 Flickr photographers from whom he obtained permission via email. Despite a price north of $7 with shipping, Powzek has not turned a profit, but people clearly get a kick out of his product; one Australian even put in a special bulk order to redistribute back home (MagCloud doesn't ship there).

Issues commemorating the election and inauguration of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson have likewise been rare bright spots for print publications. But it remains tough to make money from one-off print runs. If only there were some sort of large, internet enabled device with a display large and high-resolution enough to get people to buy these sorts of albums over the internet.

[via Daring Fireball]

Now Flickr's copy of the image is deleted forever. Photographer and outspoken Flickr-watcher Thomas Hawk has seen the name and reports the surname has no Google hits and looks "like someone just typed random characters on a keyboard." Hawk also wonders, "If... 'Bob Xjibtstruytubopluy' claimed copyright over images in President Obama's stream, would [Flickr] simply remove these images as well?" Given the interest in this story among the president's critics, it probably won't be long now before we find out.

(Photo illustration via Thomas Hawk)

After Flickr users asked on the site about the caricature, with some saying it was covered as transformative political speech, Flickr locked down the thread. That's hardly the first time; locking discussion threads about mysteriously deleted accounts is a routine occurrence at Flickr. It's a perplexing customer-relations move for a site that asks people to trust it with some of their most precious memories — and that faces intense competition from Facebook.

At least some discussions are allowed to run for a while before hey got locked, like this one, about a guy whose perfectly innocent account was mistakenly deleted.Flickr did eventually apologize to the guy and, unlike in most cases, was able to give him his digital photos back. Why? Because was deleting so many other people's pictures that it was backlogged and never got around to his. Progress!

(Pic: Taken at Twitter HQ by Daniel Catt.)

It originally looked like Firas Alkhateeb, a Palestinian American University of Illinois student, had removed the caricature himself. But it turns out Flickr "removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns." Because that doctored Time cover (above) could totally be confused with the copyrighted original, as opposed to, say, a transformative political satire!

As the Slashdot crowd has been quick to point out, there are all sorts of copyrighted and often doctored images involving George W. Bush (and others - NSFW) on Flickr. Meanwhile, Obama has opened the door to lucrative government contracts for the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site.

Yes, it's easy to refute that conspiracy theory; the CEO of Yahoo has donated to Republicans Bush, John McCain and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, as photographer Thomas Hawk has pointed out. And yet Flickr's explanation remains completely ludicrous; as ludicrous as, say, nuking photos of paying customers with no warnings and no backups, or allowing someone to irreversibly delete an account because they can guess the account-holders birthday or other security-question answer.

There's no need, in other words, to chalk up to political favoritism that which can just as easily be explained by corporate arrogance and the willful disdain of paying customers.

Something like this has happened before. The last time we checked in with the Yahoo-owned site, it had irreversibly deleted 1,200 of a paying user's photos for posting excessive comments on the White House Flickr stream. To console the user, Flickr offered a $25 gift card, but that was it; Yahoo customer service VP Heather Champ told the user it was impossible to retrieve old photos, implying the site had no backups.

Now comes Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan who said he spent "thousands of dollars" developing the photos in his paid Flickr account. A hacker — sounds like an old flame, perhaps — somehow joined a hotmail account to his Flickr account, then nuked his photos. Tepsic aruges, persuasively, that Flickr should have done more to protect his account, at the very least emailing him to confirm the Hotmail account or at least the account termination. Instead, he says he woke up to these three emails:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!

2. Your password has been changed!

3. Your account has been terminated!

Flickr support was a nightmare; at one point Tepsic was told Flickr had no phones, an assertion quickly disproved using Flickr itself (in a photo captioned "Too many phones... at Flickr HQ"). Last weekend we sent Yahoo questions about Tepsic's case and more generally about its backup procedures. Monday a Yahoo spokesperson said the company was looking into our query; we still haven't heard back.

If the struggling internet company wants to retain its paying Flickr customers, and compete with photo-saturated Facebook, it should be more careful with customer data. And Flickr users, of course, should emphatically back up their stuff. Keeping data in "the cloud" isn't all its cracked up to be.

(Pic: Taken at Flickr HQ, by Daniel Catt)

Johnson, at least, has received a more clear explanation for why his account was summarily deleted with no warning: Heather Champ, Yahoo's VP of customer service, told him he had been "spamming" the White House photostream. (Johnson has said he posted an initial batch of approximately 10 comments, then another 10 or so when those were deleted. Yahoo has declined to address Johnson's case directly with us.)

Champ also told Johnson the image he attached to his second batch of messages was too graphic. The picture, which you can see here, was from the Abu Ghraib prison and was linked over by Johnson from another Flickr account. Johnson, who has attended his share of political protests, was trying to draw attention to Barack Obama's support for a controversial bill that would have suppressed government torture photos.

Champ broke out both the carrot and the stick. She offered Johnson a $25 gift card he could use for a new Flickr Pro account. "She tried to shower me with platitudes like "Oh I know you are passionate about this issue,'" Johnson told us.

But she also told him there was no way to retrieve his old photos; that seems unlikely, as it implies Yahoo has no backups of Flickr's content. Champ also blocked messages from Johnson's new Flickr account on the internal FlickrMail system. Following a phone conversation with Johnson, she had posted a picture indicating her day wasn't going well, and Johnson had commented underneath the picture, "this is like watching a slow train wreck." She then blocked him.

So Johnson turned to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield (above), seeking help in reaching Champ. Butterfield left Yahoo last year, but he said he could tell what was going on from a distance: Johnson must be in the wrong. Their correspondence:

Yahoo's cuddly new head of PR, Eric Brown, might want to start exercising some message discipline over this situation. Does the company regret its actions (gift card) or stand by them? Does it really have no backups of old pictures? What are the guidelines for commenting on the popular White House photostream? People will inevitably criticize Yahoo's answers to those questions, but at least they'll have them.

(Picture by Dan Farber)

An unrepentant Yahoo won't say what, exactly, Johnson did wrong. His comments were about Barack Obama's support of a bill allowing the government to suppress torture photos. They were attached to seemingly relevant images from the president's recent trip to Cairo to ring in a new era of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations.

"I thought, this is an opportunity I can use to let the administration know how I feel about some of its policies," Johnson told us in a phone interview.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Virginia man's initial 10 or so comments, which went up Wednesday night, were deleted without explanation by Friday. That night, Johnson posted roughly ten more to different White House photos, this time linking in another Flickr user's Abu Ghraib picture, as allowed by Flickr's comment formatting (see Johnson's reproduction of his comment, left, taken from his post to freedom-of-information hub Cryptome).

In the midst of this second round of commenting, Johnson found his account was gone. There had been no warning of any sort from Yahoo, he said. Johnson would later work his way up Flickr's customer service tree, eventually leaving a message for the vice president of customer service and other bigwigs. He even left a message for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — a noted fan of frank discourse — on Bartz's home answering machine.

Johnson, who lives outside Richmond, still has no answers. More crucially, he also doesn't have access to any of the 1,200 pictures he uploaded to Flickr under his paid "Pro" membership. Many of the pics, he said, were "completely irretrievable — I didn't back them up on any disks, I just spur-of-the-moment loaded it up and deleted the flash" memory originals.

Asked about all this, Yahoo issued us a statement (see below) saying its policies prevented it from discussing Johnson's account and pointing us to Flickr's community guidelines.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if the company expects people to move their data to its servers, via sites like Flickr and Yahoo Mail, it's going to have to do better than that. Users won't feel safe moving their data into Yahoo's "cloud" if it can vanish without a trace with no warning.

Similarly, Flickr's user base of photographers is notoriously sensitive to any hint of censorship, so the company would be well-advised to come up with a coherent explanation for why the most powerful man in the world needs to be so ruthlessly protected against a slightly aggressive internet commenter. Where's Carol Bartz's straight talk when you need it?

[via Cryptome] [top image by vanson on Flickr]

Flickr statement:

In accordance with Flickr's policy, we cannot disclose information to third parties concerning a member's account. However, in joining Flickr, all of our members agree to abide by our Community Guidelines. These guidelines require that all of our members be respectful of the community and flag content that may not be suitable for "safe" viewing. Our members have always done a great job of identifying inappropriate and offensive content on Flickr and bringing it to our attention. We encourage all members to continue to make Flickr a safe place to share photos and videos.


Flickr is a very large community made up of many types of members from all over the world, and we respect the viewpoints and expressions of all of our members. In crafting the Community Guidelines, Flickr weighed the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the overall community, and built a system that would enable members to choose what they want to view. As with any community, online or off, there are members who may disregard the Community Guidelines. When this happens, Flickr may have to take action accordingly towards building a respectful community. For more information: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

One of those is Cal Henderson, Flickr's longtime director of engineering (left). AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports that he's left Flickr and is working on a startup with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who quit Yahoo with a bizarre resignation letter last year.

That's not all he's up to: We hear he spoke at some length with a Google recruiter at a party Saturday night. In an IM conversation, Henderson admitted he went to a party "with some folks from Six Apart [the blog-software company] and Flickr," but denied he'd spoken to anyone from Google.

Google's interest in Flickr's people is of long standing. Before Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005, Butterfield and his cofounder, then-wife Caterina Fake, flirted seriously with selling to Google. (In the small-world department: Megan Smith, the Google executive who championed a purchase of Flickr, is married to Swisher, the blogger who broke the news of Henderson and Butterfield's new startup.)

So if Google can't have Flickr, why not have its best people? No surprise that they're talking — and no surprise that Henderson's playing hard to get.

To this day, every history of Flickr has an obligatory mention of the "husband-and-wife team" who started the photo site. Indeed, their relationship was a key part of the winsome story that made Flickr so appealing to reporters and consumers. But we've been hearing for some time that Butterfield and Fake are no longer husband and wife.

They have not worked together in years. After they sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $35 million, Fake almost immediately took an executive role developing new products, while Butterfield stayed at Flickr as the site's often-diffident manager. They did manage one joint launch: the birth of their daughter Sonnet in 2007. Both left Yahoo last year.

Hunch, which we're told is going to be some sort of question-and-answer search engine, could be launching any day. Fake seems to have thrown herself into working at the New York-based as a chief product officer, a demanding job with a bicoastal commute. One of Fake's cofounders recently told an investor not to be concerned with Fake's availability to work, saying she was divorced. If they are, it's not clear if the couple has actually completed the process; a search of public records did not show a divorce agreement, and Fake and Butterfield did not respond to email inquiries. But their friends agree they are no longer together.

Last July, when she announced on her blog that she'd be joining the startup, she noted:

Will you be working with Stewart? No, he's currently weighing various metallurgical opportunities.

And there is this: Fake has posted only one photo to Flickr since last July: a screenshot of the original Flickr homepage. A wave of nostalgia, as she moves on to the new? Butterfield, meanwhile, seems to have no trouble making friends.

(Photo via caterina)

The sacking of designer George Oates and two of her colleagues might seem too minor to note in a week where 1,500 of their colleagues also got pink-slipped. But Flickr has been spared in past rounds of layoffs. And the seemingly political dismissal of Oates, a well-regarded designer and popular figure in the office, has created a stir of more consequence.

Flickr had become the last great hope of Yahoo, the place where talents frustrated with the Web giant's bureaucracy fled. But it was never meant to be a redoubt of cool — rather, it was meant to be the home base of a conquering army which would transform all of Yahoo, infusing its websites with the buzz of user participation.

Didn't happen. For a while, Flickr rode high; last year, Yahoo shut down its bigger Yahoo Photos site in Flickr's favor. But then Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield left. They put Flickr in the hands of a Yahoo executive, Kakul Srivastava, who made the decision to lay off Oates, I'm told.

I haven't uncovered the specific reason Srivastava and Oates had a tiff, but it seems impossible to argue that the firing had anything to do with performance. Oates had championed a project to post photos from the Library of Congress's collections; Library officials just yesterday declared it a resounding success.

This is how a team falls apart: Remove a key player, and the social bonds that keep their friends on the job weaken. Before you know it, you've got a group of employees collecting paychecks, not a team working for a goal. Bugs go unfixed; servers crash; the design becomes ugly; and users flee. This could well happen to Flickr. Back up your photos now!

If that happens, what it tells us is that the culture of Flickr was always illusory — one built on personal ties rather than more lasting devotion to a cause. If so, the notion of exporting it to Yahoo was a delusion. That's the problem with turning a community into a commodity: Take away the people, and you have nothing left.

(Photo by martinalvarez)

Yahoo turns 15 next month. The site first went live, on a Stanford Unversity server, in January 1994. The years since fall neatly into two halves: the first, its dizzying rise from a campus trailer to $100 billion goliath; the second, its equally stupefying fall. Here's a recap of the past decade and a half.

1994


Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo create Jerry's Guide to the Web, a directory of links to websites, in January. In April, they rename it Yahoo.

1995
Yahoo incorporates in March. Sequoia Capital, a VC firm which invested in Apple and Cisco, buys in. In August, it starts selling ads. The Web is now a business.

1996
Yang and Filo appear on the cover of Wired; Yahoo goes public, beating most of its Web rivals to the punch. But the early stock offering also means Yang and Filo are now subject to the whims of shareholders. Yahoo Japan, a partly-owned subsidiary, launches.

1999


Yahoo spends billions of dollars on GeoCities and Broadcast.com, acquisitions that later prove a waste — save for turning Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban into a billionaire, allowing him to buy the Dallas Mavericks and become an ongoing source of entertainment.

2000
Yahoo's market cap peaks in January above $100 billion. The stock begins a long slide after the dotcom bubble pops. In June, it signs a deal to have Google provide its search results. In retrospect, this is where everything started to go wrong.

2001
After a three-month search, Yahoo hires Terry Semel, the former head of the Warner Bros. studio, as CEO.

2002
Yahoo announces plans to buys Inktomi, a search engine.

2003
Semel follows the Inktomi buy with Overture, which sells search advertising, in a strategy to beat Google.

2004
Yahoo hires Lloyd Braun, a former ABC executive, to run its media operations. Hilarity ensues, as Braun proves laughably unsuited to the job and the online medium, and Yahoo's push into Hollywood-style content production proves a flop.

2005


Yahoo has secret talks to buy Flickr, the photo-sharing site. That deal happens. Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Yahoo reaches the peak of its post-bubble influence — but the surge proves illusory.

2006
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Lloyd Braun "quits."

2007
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Semel resigns. Yang replaces him.

2008
In a phone call in late January, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bids $44.6 billion for the company — sort of. Semel quits the board that night. Yang and the board dither. In February, Yahoo lays off 1,000 employees. Microsoft eventually walks away. Corporate raider Carl Icahn buys shares, raises a stink, and gets three board seats. Yang steps down as CEO, pending a search for his replacement. In December, Yahoo lays off another 1,500 employees — 10 percent of its workforce. There's talk that Microsoft might be having secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens.

(Photo of Yang and Flickr's Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield by Ross Mayfield)

Back in the conference room, the morning meeting winds down, and attention drifts to the window of an adjoining office. On the other side, another Flickr employee smiles politely through the glass. Then he turns his back to us and lowers his pants to his ankles. It's a full and excellent moon, and our room delivers a restrained golf clap.

Had that happened in Yahoo's more restrained Sunnyvale headquarters, I'd bet a pink slip would have been delivered instead. Colin doesn't tell readers who it was, leaving us to guess. Review Flickr's staff list, and place your bets in the comments.

Though Flickr is popular, Yahoo has long struggled to figure out how to make enough money on it to cover the site's heavy bandwidth expenses. It also struggled to integrate the company after buying it three years ago.

Getty, meanwhile, has a ready monetization model through its existing licensing business. If it owned Flickr outright, it might be able to streamline the current licensing process, which requires Getty reps to contact individual Flickr account holders, obtain permission and vet the pictures.

After seeing its margins squeezed by Flickr-based sites like EveryStockPhoto, Getty Images decided to buy one, iStockPhoto. It then sold itself to San Francisco private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion in February. Executives promptly gushed about "the next phase of Getty Images' evolution.... in a very dynamic digital media environment." A Flickr purchase?

It's hard to image Hellman agreeing to pay the nearly $4 billion some speculate Flickr to now be worth. But there's a lot of room between that number and the $35 million Yahoo paid for Flickr in 2005. If the two sides could agree on a number, and if Hellman could somehow assemble the cash in this chaotic economic climate, a deal might just be possible.

We'll believe it when we see it. But if you've heard anything, we'd love to hear it too. tips@gawker.com

UPDATE: A Getty staffer wrote in. The staffer hadn't heard anything about a merger and noted that money seems tight, with the Christmas and summer parties rumored to be cancelled or reduced in size. Further, no additional staff were hired for the Flickr partnership.

(Photo by adactio on Flickr)

More spy photos? Send them in.

We can't stop — and that's okay, Thompson writes:

Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are.

This is the geek utopia of socialization, Thompson explains: Every time you Twitter a complaint about your head cold, upload a photo of yourself making a squishface, or comment on a story you read, you draw your new social circle in closer.

But to what end? While we make pals, others are making money. Thompson argues that Facebook's News Feed, introduced in 2006, revolutionized friendship. Perhaps. But a year later, Zuckerberg spoke before a Madison Avenue crowd and made clear that what he really wanted to do was revolutionize advertising.

With Zuckerberg's visionary skills, perhaps he can do both. Ideally, he'd just collapse commerce and conviviality into a single phenomenon. If you can't stop gossiping about yourself, why not at least profit from it? Twitter and Facebook could drop the question "What are you doing?" in favor of "What are you selling?" That seems clearer.

(Photo by Dominic Campbell)

(Photos by Stewart Butterfield, maguisso, doctorow, oreilly, dsifry, heather)