I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago with regards Flickr, and my wish list for the photo sharing site. Almost immediately, Galleries appeared. Not something I had on my wish list. Not something I think is terribly useful, but I dare say some will like it. Yesterday (or was it the day before), Flickr gave us another new addition. They rebranded the top of the Flickr page adding “from Yahoo” to the Flickr text. It’s not gone down well with a lot of Flickr users who don’t seem to like it. It’s at the top of the image below.
I don’t like it much either. It’s tacky. It’s page pollution even. But I don’t blame Yahoo for wanting to brand a site they own, one that is surely one of their crown jewels. But they could have done it an awful lot better. I’ve long felt that Yahoo needs to bring their disparate products under a unifying umbrella of some sort, and the simple way, it seems to me, would be to have a bar along the top of the page.
I’ve made a mock up below, using the graphic I created for the ‘wish list’ post, to demonstrate what I mean. A banner which displays Yahoo sites to allow users to access other parts of Yahoo’s online empire. Which parts? The E button on the right is for Edit. Let the user choose which sites are on the banner. Don’t force irrelevant or unwanted options on us. The S button, to allow us to Sign In. And the last button, the C? C is for Close. If a user doesn’t want the banner, let them turn it off. Easy as that. And then everyone is happy.
The Mexile 