Flickr Founders Fake & Butterfield Latest To Leave Yahoo

Yahoo feels like a nation that
won its independence
only to see all its leaders immediately flee the country. The latest
emigrants: Flickr cofounders Caterina
Fake and Stewart Butterfield. Their departure is unlikely to stall
Flickr, but it gives a terrible impression of Yahoo as a company in further
disarray.

TechCrunch

broke the news of the departures.

Valleywag has Butterfield’s resignation letter, where he alludes to
Yahoo being a company that had expanded beyond its core "tin" production to
the degree he felt "my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing."
Aside from Yahoo’s woes, the departures might also be due to the co-founders
coming to the end of a deal with Yahoo, as Thomas Hawk

speculates.

It’s difficult to know how seriously Butterfield means what he says in
the letter. If it’s really that Yahoo has expanded too much — well, Flickr
was one of those expansions. A good one, of course — and one Yahoo backed to
the degree of
shutting down Yahoo Photos last year.

Techmeme has
more discussion on the departures from across the web.
Via News.com,
see also
what
people on Flickr are saying about the move (the
Flickr blog still has no news — get
with it, Yahoo!).

Yahoo Loses Jeff
Weiner But Probably Won’t Replace Him from us covers the departure of
high-profile search czar Jeffrey Weiner last week. Our
Yahoo
Employees archives detail many other departures.