Flickr is one of Yahoo’s most popular services and since former Googler Marissa Mayer became CEO, Yahoo has been looking to capitalise on the photo-sharing site’s popularity.
Last year, Yahoo tried to attract more users by offering 1Tb of free online photo storage. Now the company is using Flickr as a gateway for creating a Yahoo account – if you didn’t have one already.
“Starting this month, we will be requesting that everyone use a Yahoo username and password to sign in to Flickr,” Markus Spiering, Flickr’s head of product, said on the service’s forum.
The posting also said that “eventually Facebook and Google sign-in will be removed”. When exactly, Yahoo will dump Facebook and Google logins for Flickr is unclear. However, The Next Web reports the deadline is 30 June.
Flickr has set-up a special login page for Facebook and Google users that asks you to sign-in one last time with your third-party options. After that, you’ll be prompted to create a new Yahoo account. The special login page will also let anyone who already has a Yahoo ID, but hasn’t been using it with Flickr, to connect their Flickr account to their Yahoo login.
Yahoo says it is making the change to better serve its users with features such as easier password recovery, faster customer support, and a unified company login.
That last point is particularly important since Yahoo’s biggest play here is to try and own its users again. Like other web giants, Yahoo wants to be your online data silo and to get a sense of your preferences by tracking your Yahoo ID across the Web. That’s a strategy that has proven very valuable for Google since data such as e-mail contents, location data, and browsing history help the company more precisely target ads, and thus attract more advertisers.
A heavily used Yahoo ID also enables the company to offer a more unified and personalised set of services.
Yahoo originally introduced Facebook and Google login options in 2011.
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