Consider the signup screen for Flickr before Yahoo:

They make jokes about the screen name, remind you that it’s changeable, express their hatred for spam, and poke fun at the terms of use. And just as importantly, they only ask three questions and a confirmation. That’s it. Takes no time to complete, involves little brain activity, and you get to chuckle about it. In other words, a near perfect signup procedure.

Now consider the signup screen for Flickr after Yahoo (which in true megaplex style requires three redirects and clicking signup twice, both on Flickr and the Yahoo-Flickr site):

Not only is it two-and-a-half times longer, it involves sixteen questions and an opt-out cross-sell “opportunity” to get Yahoo Mail. It wants to know what industry you’re in and whether you like your Yahoo content from the US or Korea. It needs your first name, last name, gender, and possibly the middle name of your father.

It features a terms of service agreement that sounds like it was written by nasty lawyers armed with medieval instruments of truth-extraction. And they display it in the classic nobody-is-ever-going-to-read-this 4-line textarea.

The contrast to plain English terms like “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Flickr users” from the original agreement couldn’t be starker.

“But only pedantic industry insiders care about all of this,” you say? Wrong. The only reason I dug into this issue and found these apalling before and after shots is because my lovely girlfriend tried to sign up for Flickr last night.

She didn’t made it and ended up at 23hq instead. Flickr squandered the implicit trust I had for them by subjecting her to this cruel and unsual signup hell.

This, however, is not meant to be a slam as much as a cry for mercy. Yahoo, Flickr, we know you guys can do so much better than this. We know that you don’t intend to poison the well for future acquisitions and make users hate them on instinct.

To Yahoo: Recognize that the reason you bought Flickr in the first place was (hopefully) because you liked the groove they had going on. And even more so, you liked the demonstrated success of said groove. Consider if the droidinization of Flickr perhaps couldn’t have happened slower, later, and with fewer casulties. You guys stand to be the new cool. This is one step forward, two backwards.

To Flickr: Come on, guys. You had us eating out of your palms. You’re so much cooler than this. We know its not your lips talking when you say “Another motivation is all the stuff that Flickr can leverage from around the Yahoo! network if people can use their Yahoo! IDs in Flickr.”

In other words, this is not about big being bad (we have plenty of other posts on that). This is just about not turning people away at the door, about doing more of what made you superstars in the first place, and about showing that the latest surge of M&A activity isn’t all about killing kittens.

We trust that the two of you can work it out!