Yahoo to buy Flickr, the popular photo sharing service used by many bloggers

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 at 5:13 pm

Link: Yahoo! News – Yahoo Buying Photo-Sharing Service Flickr.

SAN FRANCISCO – Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) is acquiring a Canadian photo-sharing company that lets people share digital images with select groups or the whole world, expanding its portfolio of self-publishing and ‘social networking’ services.

I’m expecting this will work hand in hand with Yahoo’s recently announced Yahoo 360 virtual community,which will include blogs and photo sharing. While Yahoo already has their own photo-sharing service, Flickr is far superior.

I wonder if the pricing structure at Flickr will change as a result of their new parent, and if free accounts will still exist for non-users of Yahoo’s own blogging service.

Currently, Flickr is one of the most popular methods of posting pictures on Blogger / Blogspot (which does not host its own images). Seeing as how Blogger is owned by Google, Yahoo’s biggest competitor, it will be interesting to see how these plays out for Flickr users on Blogger. I’m surprised Google didn’t try to snap up Flickr themselves – I guess they thought Picasa was good enough (not, especially for photo sharing).

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