Yahoo's Last Great Holiday Party?

Sonya and I attended what may have been Yahoo’s last great Year End Party, at least for the time being. In my 7 years with the company they’ve always had great parties to end the year and celebrate our accomplishments.

With the economy as sour as it is, and with all the acquisition talk that’s been going on, everyone is wondering if there will ever be another YEP, at least on the scale that we’ve grown accustomed.

Many asked why Yahoo sank so much money into a party, especially given the rumors that a layoff is about to happen. Why not use that money to save a few jobs? The response was that the company booked (and paid) for the facilities months ago, long before there were any inklings of a layoff. Sounds reasonable to me.



This year’s themes was “Las Vegas”. Two large halls at the San Mateo Expo Center were decorated with Las Vegas hotel themes. There was Treasure Island, Ceasar’s Palace, Luxor and one other I can’t remember.

There was also a wedding chapel, where Elvis was there to marry and willing souls.

The Spasmatics played a great set that included lots of 80’s tunes. It was good to have a chance to celebrate all the hard work that’s been put into making Yahoo a leader in the industry. Times are tough, but it’s still one of the greatest places in the world to work.



I just hope there will be another YEP to celebrate in the future.

Time to Flickr-ize

Yahoo announced that they will be shutting down Yahoo Photos in September, which makes perfect sense given the acquisition of Flickr two years ago. As part of the shuttering, they're allowing users to auto transfer photos to Flickr or three other non-Yahoo photo services.

I transferred all my photos on Sunday, and the process was pretty easy. Photos are tagged as private, so there is the extra step of marking the pics as public if you want the world to see your photos.

Flickr is an amazing service. If you're dabbling in the whole digital photos thing, give it a try. It's easy enough for novices to pickup easily, and powerful enough to offer some pretty cool features if you're a power user.

You can checkout all 4,594 photos I currently have stored there by checking out my public photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thefeeder/

My favorite feature is the bulk management functionalty, being able to present groups of photos in sets, and geo-tagging photos via Yahoo maps.

If you have any photos stored at Yahoo! Photos, make sure you migrate them soon.