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Yahoo buys Flickr

Posted by timothy on from the funny-announcement dept.

FLickLover writes "Yahoo is buying Flickr for an undisclosed amount. The rumors of the deal have been doing the rounds for weeks now. On the Flickr Blog Ludicorp folks are talking about the deal and how it impacts the community. "We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks! Woohoo! " This is the third high profile Blog/RSS related buyout of 2005. Live Journal was bought by Six Apart, while Ask Jeeves snapped up Bloglines." Update: 03/21 12:49 GMT by H : And my favorite comment on it comes from Ben Hyde's blog. Genius.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Flickr is very cool and I hope it stays that way. by jbum · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a big fan of Flickr, which if you haven't heard of it, is a community-oriented photo-sharing service. Their photo-sharing API has enabled me to quickly assemble some nifty things such as this Colr Pickr and photo mosaics. However, I must admit I have mixed feelings about this acquisition, perhaps due my experiences in the late 90s, in which I found myself in a continual battle with new corporate overlords.

    If you read the posts that founders Stewart and Caterina have been making in the Flickr Blog, and elsewhere, it's clear that they truly believe that this acquisition is for the best, and I don't doubt that both the Ludicorp folks and the Yahoo folks have the best of intentions.

    Just as small children sometimes accidentally mistreat beloved pets, large groups of people with the best of intentions sometimes break things. Flickr currently has the feel of a 'mom & pop shop' and it is hard to believe that this state of affairs will continue with the influx of more money & extra management. But let's hope so!

  2. Keeping up with, then shooting, the joneses... by mcc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps I'm excessively cynical, but I can't help but wonder if along with Flickr Yahoo is acquiring any patents that could be used to chase competing photo-sharing products out of the market... like Yahoo is doing to XFire already...

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  3. Re:So will they finally get rid of that stupid thi by cmallinson · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If you examine the source code to Flickr pages, the image URL is provided as an argument to the flash plugin -> it's possible to get the JPEG directly without capturing the screen.

    I hate all things Flash - including this. For those of us who have flash turned off / disabled, it's extremely inconvenient. There's no reason that an online image viewer should need to use it. Period.

    First of all, you went to the trouble of finding out that the image url is passed to the flash application, but did not realize that they provide that URL in a link next to the picture? Did you also notice that they provide the URL to alternate sizes of the picture as well?

    Secondly, Flash is NOT REQUIRED to use Flickr. Turn Flash off, and it still works.

    So tell me again about how inconvenient Flickr is to those who are too good for Flash.