Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake have joined the parade of executives leaving Yahoo. Flake officially left the company Friday, while Butterfield will leave on July 12. He will be replaced by product-management director Kakul Srivastava.

Fake and Butterfield’s departures are just the latest in a veritable exodus. Earlier that week, Jeff Weiner, vice president of Yahoo’s network division, announced he is leaving. Last week, Jeremy Zawodny, who had been Yahoo’s chief open-source developer, and Usama Fayyad, vice president of research and strategic notes solutions, announced their exits.

Yahoo bought Flickr, an original Web 2.0 photo-sharing site, in 2005, and it was generally considered a jewel in Yahoo’s crown. PaidContent once described Flickr as “one of the few investments Yahoo has not messed up.”

Microsoft Distractions

Weiner left Yahoo to join the venture firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners as executive in residence, where he will advise the firms’ leadership teams of existing consumer-technology portfolio companies,

“and will additionally work closely with the firm’s partners to evaluate new investment opportunities,” according to a press release.

Clearly, Yahoo has been distracted by Microsoft’s abandoned takeover attempt. President Jerry Yang has spent substantial amounts of day not only in negotiations with Microsoft, but additionally in seeking out white knights and forging strategic relationships with Google and others. He’s plus been dealing with a shareholder revolt led by Carl Icahn, and he has been involved in responses to several lawsuits.

“The company’s been going through turmoil in the last few months,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. With Yahoo’s annual meeting scheduled for Aug. 1, “We’ll be looking at weeks more of turmoil,” King continued. “It becomes very hard to achieve anything in that kind of environment.”

Phone Lines Humming

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