I hate Yahoo. I have for a while now. The primary reason is that they thought it would be peachy-keen to terminate my Yahoo account without reason or notice. I hadn't used any Yahoo-branded services for years, so when I noticed what they'd done, I shrugged and said, "Good Riddance." That is, until I realized that they'd also locked me out of my paid Flickr Pro account. Now, with a little finagling, I was able to get an "old school" account from Flickr (that's what they called users who'd been with Flickr before Yahoo bought them). Sure, I was still using Yahoo service, but I made do without a Yahoo account until they forced all Flickr users into Yahoo accounts (which also resulted in me getting called out on MeFi). (This little shenanigan also locked me out of my Blogger account, as for some reason I used my Y! email to sign up.)

So now I have a Yahoo account. 99% of it is used for Flickr, along with one use of Upcoming, and two very stubborn contacts who only have Y! Messenger (seriously, guys, WTF?). So while I can't stand Yahoo, Flickr make it all worthwhile.

So now that Yahoo is nearing free-fall, zyzzyva's post has got me thinking. Flickr couldn't just vanish, could it? Surely it's too valuable a commodity to just vanish into the ether alongside .Mac and Ate My Balls? I had always hoped Google would buy it, even more so after Yahoo integrated its comparably awful mapping software into Flickr. But as zyzzyva also points out, Google already has Picasa. But Picasa's interface is a bit intrusive and decidedly non-Google-like. Plus, it's unavailable for OS X (though I will admit that Flickr's Uploadr is pretty dreadful itself). And even though I know at least a dozen Google employees, I think I know three people who actually use Picasa over Flickr.

Flickr definitely seems to have emerged as the de facto photo host of the Internet Generation (sorry, MC Lars, but there's just no way). Certainly it'll rise out of Yahoo's ashes, right?

Right?