Yahoo's new Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer has lots of challenges ahead of her. One of those, the Internet hopes, is to fix the once beloved photo-sharing site Flickr.
Now making its way around the Internet: the new site DearMarissaMayer.com and matching Twitter hashtag that broadcast eight words contributors hope will inspire change: "Dear Marissa Mayer, please make Flickr awesome again" (a sentiment also expressed earlier today by CNET's Rafe Needleman).
DearMarissaMayer.com went live early today. It was started by Sean Bonner, the Los Angeles-based co-founder and global director of the nonprofit Safecast, which monitors radiation. Bonner also runs a hacker space in L.A.
"It's just been a total bummer how much it's been neglected," Bonner said of Flickr in an interview today with CNET's Needleman. "The core community has been screaming."
Flickr was once considered one of the hippest site on the Internet -- home to professional photographers, hipsters, and burgeoning hobbyists. The site launched in 2004 and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. It thrived for several years under Yahoo's stewardship, but analysts, cited by The Atlantic Wire, have suggested that the site began losing steam around 2008.
The overarching presumption is that Yahoo stifled the site's potential by forcing the team to ingrate rather than innovate.
"We spent a lot of time in meetings with [corporate development] just defending the product and justifying our decisions," a former Flickr team member told Gizmodo in May.
A series of changes and forced integration with Yahoo products may be at the root of the community's eventual disenchantment with the photo-sharing site. Flickr's traffic continues to decline. However, we would be remiss not to mention that the rise of Facebook and Twitter in a new era of the social Web may also be factor in Flickr's decline -- not just because the Internet evolved, but because Flickr seemingly did not.
Yahoo has been criticized over the years for losing its way as a technology company. Mayer's background as an engineer and high-profile former Google executive seems to be giving pundits a glimmer of hope for Yahoo and all of its products.
This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com. CNET's Rafe Needleman contributed to this report.
