Flickr vs Yahoo sign-up

Signal vs Noise has a good piece about the replacement of Flickr's friendly, humorous and welcoming sign-up page with Yahoo's corporate infovacuum. It's particularly sad to see this happen, as social sites like Flickr rely on the number and quality of participants and it's almost certain that many of these people won't bother to make it past Yahoo's sign-up screen.

I must have created about 20 Yahoo accounts over the last few years, as there's no easy way to get a password reminder sent out. Here are the bits of information that Yahoo requires when you sign up:

Personal Information

'Security' Information

Verify Your Registration

Terms of Service

In contrast, the only fields that are necessary for using Flickr are the ID, password and email address, then showing a profile page after sign-up allows you to set a screen name and other optional preferences.