I have a feeling that today, 13th of June 2007 will be a day that the officials at Flickr won't forget that easily. The photo-sharing site, beloved by many, thought they had hit the jackpot by rolling out versions of their page in eight other languages besides the original English.
The main problem though are not the language, even though the translations are a bit, well, special. The main problems are the two new "features" they introduced along with the translation.
The first thing is about payment - they nixed out Paypal support, the only way people without a credit card are able to buy things from abroad online. That is a major mistake since they are basically turning away people who want to give them money.
The main problem though is something that some people refer to as
The Big Flickr Censorship. Flickr decided to take away the right to choose which kind of content user want to see by disabling the SafeSearch filter settings from people in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea. Until now the Flickr staff still did not quite explain why, so the whole thing is getting
quite ugly rather fast.
Oh, what happened to my good old feel-good-Flickr?
I find it hard to estimate how fast this really develops, but i hope that the not agreeing people don't spread in too many protest groups.
Also, if they keep it like this, i'm out of flickr. There is no use in a service that censors its customers in that way since this will be only the start then.