So, yesterday, I buried my Old Skool Flickr identity and “merged” it with my Yahoo! account. I’d put off doing the meld on other occasions when the Yahoo! corporate machine made noises but this time there was a deadline, so I decided to bow.

Despite the obvious benefits of a unified ID (and if you’ve ever been involved with developing and maintaining on-line applications you’ll know what I mean), I still felt a little part of me fall off its perch and go to join the choir invisible. Flickr has become an important part of my life and, since I publish many of my photographs there, a part of my identity.

The Old Skool Flickr was a young upstart showing what could be done with the Web, with its own quirky way of doing things. Then it was subsumed into the Yahoo! corporation but there was still a core of the personality that made Flickr so attractive in the first place. I’m pretty confident that as long as Stewart and Caterina are in the mix there will always be a bit of that Ludicorp spirit, however, a chapter has come to an end; an identity has been homogenised.