Thomas Hawk

Hmmm. - Russellreno

Interesting... gotta try out the competition I guess. - Mike Wills

Here is Scott Dietzen's Flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/d... It doesn't look like he's played around with Flickr much in the past which worries me a tad now that he's running it. I just made him my friend on Flickr. We'll see if he reciprocates, right now he only has one contact on the whole site. - Thomas Hawk

Valleywag material? - Mike Doeff

Oh... that can't be good then. - Mike Wills

Interesting... it doesn't sound good though, not at all. - Mirko

Maybe Valleywag material. I don't read the rag anymore though. They lie too much. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, I think the Flickr group will report up to Dietzen but it looks like Kakul Srivastava will be the general manager of Flickr. http://blogpost.counterjumper.... - Mike Doeff

Dietzen's personal website does not inspire confidence - Rafael Robayna

Here is Kakul on CrunchBase http://www.crunchbase.com/pers... . If you look on the left you'll see that she has the General Manager title, although the profile still has her as Senior Director of Product Management. - Mike Doeff

yes, of course, Kakul runs Flickr. She's got Stewart's old job. I was more interested in who she would be reporting up to. - Thomas Hawk

... and for what it's worth, Stewart Butterfield called Kakul his "Hero" http://www.flickr.com/photos/s... - Mike Doeff

It's kind of ironic that you pointed this out, Thomas ;-) - Dave Roth

Is there anything cool in SmugMug that might/should get brought over into Flickr, features wise? - Gary

Well, you are the ceo of Zooomr and .... :P - Kreg Steppe

It could be seen as a positive. If he currently prefers another site, maybe he will drive improvements at flickr. As pointed out, it is ironic that it is you who brings this up ;) - CJPhoto

@Gary: Smugmug has a ton of stuff that Flickr doesn't - better privacy controls, better image protection with more fine grained control over that, better layouts, it accepts bigger photos, lets you sell prints for a profit, domain name mapping, and you can customize to your hearts content. That said Flickr is more community/sharing oriented, Smugmug is a better product for pros, so I don't know if all those features would fit in at Flickr. - Eric P

I haven't used SmugMug enough yet to fully offer an opinion. Their reputation for customer service, however, is outstanding. I had trouble uploading some photos there but I've yet to really give it a go. I love Zooomr and especially the smaller community there. I think Flickr has the best photo sharing site on the web today though and am heavily invested in it from an emotional standpoint. - Thomas Hawk

I doesn't bother me at all that Dietzen uses SmugMug to host his own personal photos while ultimately overseeing Flickr. I'm more concerned that he may not fully understand all the ins and outs of how to make a photo sharing site better or share the passion that some of us have for photo sharing in general. Flickr is a terribly important property for far more than economic reasons. - Thomas Hawk

looks like his design skills are like hm, eh, not available? - Kai Müller

I'd be more worried if he didn't have any photos. I think it's healthy for people to use the competition's products. It shows that they're open to ideas outside their company and won't overlook the features that make the competition useful. The alternative is for them to follow Ballmer who insists that his family can't use any Apple products. - Adewale Oshineye

Eric - Thanks for the SmugMug comparison. I'm still trying to figure out how to share photos. I faved a few of Scott's photos. Loved the water & wildlife shots. Hope he improves Flickr - the interface SUCKS. It's really difficult to find & use features in Flickr. As a new Flickr user, I'm getting lost, and very important features are hard to find (like how to "make someone a contact" - drop-down on icon, had to use search & help). Lousy, lousy UI. Google Picasa & FriendFeed are much easier to use for new people... - Mitchell Tsai

ROFL!! - DC Crowley via twhirl

Ok, this is getting a lot more interesting. I've been emailing back and forth with the VP of Corp. Communications at Yahoo, Jennifer Stephens Acree, for the past few hours. Dietzen is not in charge of Flickr, Tapan Bhat is. Tapan Bhat reports up to Ash Patel. Working on a whole different angle for this story. We'll see how it unfolds. - Thomas Hawk

The plot thickens. - Mike Doeff

I have to be sensitive about my users' expectations about privacy, but let's just say that there are other VP+ Yahoos (and Googlers and ...) execs using us. I'm not surprised, and I don't think it's a big deal, just saying this is hardly unique. We have Flickr users at SmugMug, too. :) - Don MacAskill

Don, that doesn't surprise me. You guys offer a good service for hosting and sharing your photos. Still, it does surprise me how little Yahoo execs seem to be using Flickr. It would be my hope that maybe a bit more "dogfooding" as they like to say up in Redmond might be going on with Yahoo execs at Flickr. - Thomas Hawk

Flickr excels at the online social elements of photo sharing. I'm not sure Yahoo execs really get social software (their failures are numerous), so I would bet there's a correlation here. They don't want to use it because they don't get it - which, in turn, means they fail when they try to build it. Sad, really. - Don MacAskill

Hilarious! Smugmug is better at displaying photos but not as good for the social aspect. - Stuart Forsyth via twhirl

hmmmm.. this is interesting. This story is now picking up interest by the mainstream press and I'm getting more information out of Acree. Working on another post on this whole thing right now. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, but Scott could have had his smugmug long before he even joined YHOO, Maybe Scott should speak out NOW , else tis going to be bad for the Flickr team /yhoo.. Once the MSM pick it up, there is no stopping the snowball.. regardless of his personal reason and nothing technically is wrong with hosting personal pics on smugmug ! - Peter Dawson

Honestly, I'm not sure what the problem is. People at Yahoo search on Google all the time. Likewise, plenty of Googlers use Yahoo Finance. Is that so crazy? And Yahoo vs Google is a storied rivalry. I don't think Flickr or SmugMug considers each other rivals in anything other than the broadest sense of the word. - Don MacAskill

Scott was the CEO at Zimbra, before that the CTO at BEA, and before that the head of product management for Web Logic. He practically invented the concept of the J2ME Application Server. Say what you will about J2ME, figuring out how to package those technologies into a product was quite a feat. So was Zimbra. He came into Yahoo when they aquired Zimbra. Getting Scott I'm sure was a big part of the appeal of acquiring Zimbra. - Tom Conrad

Ok, posted my follow up post to this story here: http://thomashawk.com/2008/06/... Appreciate any thoughts or feedback. Thanks for your thoughts on the matter as well Don. - Thomas Hawk

SmugMg has good customer service too- I remember Don stepping and engaged w/us when we cracked the privacy issue some time ago - Peter Dawson

Given that he's uploaded 3 albums in the last 3 years, and he's worked at Yahoo for perhaps a year, I don't think it's too surprising that he seems not to be a flickr user. Not everyone is. - j1m