So Flickr is moving from Canada (which is like the Wales of North America) to California (which is like the California of North America). This is fundamentally a good thing, simply because Flickr got bought by Yahoo who have lots more money and that means more servers and therefore less massages, not to mention it’s good when good projects get bought by companies. Especially be companies who seem to be reacquiring their sense of clue.

Now, obviously there’ll be some downtime. And there’ll be some griping. But the main source of a lot of the griping in this Flickrhelp thread is “I don’t want my data in America“. Now, for one reason or another, many people have an objection to the USA.

My objection to this ridiculous whinging is that they didn’t sign up with Flickr in the first placve because it was Canadian, but because it was cool and online. And online is everywhere, right? If it started in the US, I doubt that there’d have been this outcry to begin with. Things like Terms of Service are relatively complex beasts, and just because they’ll change in future doesn’t mean that anything else will change as a result – or that that change is for the worst. It’s a bit of fuss over nothing, really.

My best advice? Don’t listen to the whingers. People, especially dependents, hate change. Their hatred tends to be irrational and, essentially, wrong. If I’m proved wrong in future, then I’ll eat the first available hat, of course. As it stands: I chose Flickr because it was part of a digital world, not a single country. And I’m still happy to use it – and indeed, proud to use such a kickass service. (Hence all the links to Flickr in this post; it’s Pagerank as a sign of respect..).