The Internet's mandate for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer: Fix Flickr
(CBS News) Yahoo's new chief executive officer Marissa Mayer has a lot of challenges ahead of her. One of those, the Internet hopes, is to fix the once beloved photo-sharing site Flickr.
DearMarissaMayer.com and a matching Twitter hashtag is making its way around the Internet with eight words they hope will inspire change: "Dear Marissa Mayer, please make Flickr awesome again."
Flickr was one of the hippest site on the Internet - home to professional photographers, hipsters and burgeoning hobbyists. The site was launched in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. The site thrived for several years under Yahoo's stewardship. But analysts, cited by The Atlantic Wire, have suggested that the site began losing steam around 2008.
The overarching presumption is that Yahoo stifled the site's potential by forcing the team to ingrate rather than innovate.
"We spent a lot of time in meetings with [corporate development] just defending the product and justifying our decisions," a former Flickr team member told the blog Gizmodo in May.
A series of changes and forced integration with Yahoo products may be at the root of the community's eventual disenchantment with the photo-sharing site. Flickr's traffic continues to decline. However, we would be remiss not to mention that the rise of Facebook and Twitter in a new era of the social Web may also be factor in Flickr's decline - not just because the Internet evolved, but because Flickr seemingly did not.
Some of the criticism that Yahoo has received over the years is that it lost its way as a technology company. Mayer's background as an engineer and high profile former Google executive seems to be giving pundits a glimmer of hope for Yahoo and all of its products.
Whatever the cause for Flickr's decline, one thing is for sure: The fans are still there and they are hoping that Mayer will give the site new life.
