Yahoo! Requires a Dancing Pony to Open a New Account, but I Don’t Have a Dancing Pony

Nikon D200 Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 at an effective 51mm — 1/1600 sec, f/4.5, ISO 320 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Isolated and Doomed

this famous tree was cut down in February

(I photographed it in 2007 from the public road)

From the same outing that produced “More Biei Countryside” among others.

I've so many things that I want to write about lately, but just no time as I help my mom recover from a stroke. But I ran into
something so frustrating that I just have to rant a bit....

I worked for Yahoo! from 1997 to 2004, and as such it has a special place in my heart despite how it's deteriorated over the
years. Knowing how it's deteriorated, though, didn't prepare me for what I ran into recently when trying to create
a Yahoo! account for my mom.

Nikon D700 Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/6400 sec, f/3.2, ISO 200 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Entrance This Way

where is everybody?

(from “Not a Petroleum Refinery, Silly, it’s an Aquarium” in 2011)

I recently set my folks up with a new TV,
a TCL smart TV with Roku streaming service. The latter allows you to install apps on the TV, including ones that allow you to access photo-sharing sites like Yahoo's Flikr. I thought I'd set it up so that their kids (me and my siblings) can add photos of their grandkids to the Flickr account,
and my folks would then automatically see them when they put the TV into “Flickr Slideshow” mode.

So, I went to create a Yahoo! account for my mom to use as the Flickr repository for these photos, but I couldn't.
Yahoo! requires a mobile phone to create an account. If you don't have a phone that can receive a
text message, you can't create an account. It's apparently been this way for some time.

Nikon D700 Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 32mm — 1/200 sec, f/5, ISO 6400 —
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Welcome (NOT!)

(from “Kyoto’s Haunted Hua Huan Museum” in 2008)

Now, before you say “that's absolutely asinine!”, let me make a few observations. One is that it's a free service; beggars can't be choosers. Another is that though
we can only speculate on the reason, they must certainly have a specific reason for having
implemented such a draconian hurdle to participation.

What could the reason be? Well, it could be a way to choose their demographic. Maybe they simply don't want users like my mom;
maybe they're looking to skew their audience to the young and technologically hip, or to exclude folks
to don't have the discretionary income to afford a mobile phone (because inability to afford it is the only possible
reason one wouldn't have a mobile phone, you know).

Nikon D700 Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — 1/500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 4500 —
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Lots of Storage

that apparently people like my mom can't have

(from “Kyoto’s Haunted Hua Huan Museum” in 2008)

It could also be a way to avoid account-creation abuse; if you want to create multiple accounts,
you need multiple phones, and that's a hurdle that spam-bots, for example, can't easily overcome. If you don't have specific experience in the industry, you simply can not imagine the depths that
some people go through to abuse online systems. Really, you're simply not evil enough to even imagine it. So take my word that abuse curtailment is a very big deal.

Or it could be something else. Who knows? Someone at Yahoo!, probably, but not me.

Nikon D200 Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 at an effective 51mm — 1/160 sec, f/8, ISO 100 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Nobody's Home

(from “Furano in Hokkaido, Japan” in 2007)

So, given all that it's not reasonable to complain, but as a former Yahoo! I'm compelled to
exclaim:

This is absolutely asinine!

Many folks with mobile phones have no problem with this, obviously, as Yahoo! (at the moment) still seems to exist. But a lot of
folks don't have mobile phones, and a lot of folks who do don't want to reveal that private information to big
corporations like Yahoo!. Yahoo! is proactively excluding these folks, which is perhaps their exact intent,
but I don't see how this can bode well in the long term.

302HW @ 3mm — 1/180 sec, f/2, ISO 50 —
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It's All Downhill From Here

(from “Kyoto’s Nasty 21% City-Bike Hill Climb” in 2015)

photo by Gorm Kipperberg

I spent considerable time trying to find a way around it, not initially believing that Yahoo! could be so stupid. I eventually abandoned the idea.

Nikon D200 Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 at an effective 82mm — 1/320 sec, f/2.8, ISO 250 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Abandoned

(from “Snowy Round Trip to the Heian Shrine” in 2008)

I moved on to try my idea with SmugMug, a non-free photo-sharing site that I've worked with
for many years because I made a plugin for Adobe Lightroom for it.
SmugMug has always kindly provided me with a free account for plugin development, so I used that to test with. Normal users would
have to pay a nominal fee each year, but at least they don't require something that may well not exist.

In Lightroom, I created a Publish Service using my plugin to upload photos to a SmugMug gallery, adding to the pipeline my Crop for iPad plugin to crop photos on the fly to best fit the
1,920×1,080-pixel screen of the TV. (I should probably rename the plugin to remove “iPad” from the title,
since there's nothing iPad specific about it and I actually use it for more other devices than iPads.)

I then installed the SmugMug Roku app onto the TV,
and soon had a gorgeous slideshow of my test photos. It was wonderful.

As wonderful as it was, the free SmugMug Roku app didn't work quite the way I wanted... my folks would have to drill down
a few menu items each time they wanted to see a slideshow, and I wanted an even easier solution, so I bit the bullet and
returned to try Yahoo! again. I had two US phone numbers available on my own cell phone via
my attempts to get a reasonable American number for my Japanese cell phone,
so I thought to use one of them to create my mom's Yahoo! account.

No go: it simply wouldn't accept them, telling me “that's not a valid phone number”.

So I give up on trying to create a Yahoo! account for my mom, and on Yahoo! in general. I divested myself of what little YHOO
stock I still had. It's been a long, slow decline into mediocrity and irrelevance, Yahoo!, but I've been with you every step
of the way, but from now you'll have to continue down to the end without me. Bye.

Nikon D700 Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 120mm — 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 5000 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Always Stay Connected

(from “Kyoto’s Haunted Hua Huan Museum” in 2008)