Yahoo buys Flickr

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.

Comments

They've renamed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it's Fl!ckr

Yahoos' Dark Helmut

[NoGuffCheck]

Prepare ship for Ludicorp speed!

I wish I could make that much moola....

[Rick and Roll]

It's really amazing how a couple of good ideas and some initiative can turn into such a big buyout. I haven't signed up for an account, because I don't do much picture-taking, so I don't know about all of the features that helped them to make it. What I do know is that there have been many companies trying to make money of the same concept for several years.

I think the difference between them and I is partly that there was more than one competent computer scientist and partly that they understood the users so well because they were users. I can't imagine someone putting together such an excellent photo suite that wasn't into photography.

The one thing that I have in common with them is that I can think of clever ideas for implementation.

So basically, their achievement was a combination of having an excellent development team, being users (domain knowledge), and being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology to create a truly innovative product.

Anyway, I am a little jealous, but if the creators of Flickr are reading this I would like to say "Congrats."

Makes Sense

[nzgeek]

I think this makes a lot of sense. First Oddpost (for desktop-like webmail), then Flickr (for desktop-like photo management). If they can pull this together, I can see it being pretty cool.

I've been curious about Google's attempts to do email (introduce a new paradigm and confuse users), and photo management (buy a desktop product - wtf does Picass have to do with web?), but I can see some sense of coherence with Yahoo's (both web-based with slick/easy UIs).

Interesting times.

Flickr is very cool and I hope it stays that way.

[jbum]

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!

Will Yahoo eat this up?

[Lewisham]

The Flickr guys say that they'll remain separate. I fail to see how much say Ludicorp have left seeing as this appears to be a total buyout.

Yahoo! will do what they have always done, and subsume the functionality into their own, and slap it's own design on to boot. Unfortunately, unlike the Borg, Yahoo! does not look cool. The design of Yahoo! is as poor (both in ugliness and usability) today as it has always been. One of Flickr's many strengths (apart from the obvious technological ones) is that the designers always seemed to recognise the importance of *white space*. Flickr makes my photos look good. It looks professional, but it doesn't take the focus away from the photo. If Yahoo! forces the its unique brand of boring, cluttered onto the site, the usability and visual appeal is going to go down the drain. And isn't visual appeal part of why we take photos?

Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.

Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking.

Re:Will Yahoo eat this up?

[lavaface]

Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul. Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking.

Sorry, but I think in this case Yahoo's presentation is cleaner and more usable than the old geocities site. I know people 'round here like to jizz all over Google, but the fact is that Yahoo has improved the clutter greatly. Google is still my primary search engine, but I visited yahoo the other day and was fairly impressed. Compare their current page with this or this. Their yellow pages/maps served me better than google's offerings for my most recent visit *gasp*.

Say what you want about Yahoo, but I work in a university computer lab and I see people spend oodles of time over at launch (remember when they were a cd mag?) and YahooGames. They've got more eyeballs and spend more on R&D and more profitable than Google. See?

Having said that, it's hard to see how they could possibly integrate Flickr properly but don't discount them offhand because they are not "teh g00gle"

Re:excellent!

[hunterx11]

RTFA; they're buying Flickr, not AOL.

Tragic?

[Free_Trial_Thinking]

Am I the only who thinks this is a tragety(sp)?

Flickr was cool because it wasn't too commercial and wasn't in your face with signing up for shit. I can only picture what will happen under yahoo ownership ...

(fade into fantasy sequence 1 year from now)

You go onto Flickr, there are links everywhere for signing up for yahoo junk. I try to upload a photo, but instead I am taken to a page where I am solicited to sign up for something called "Yahoo groups". I try to do a search for a certain tag, but instead of pretty pictures, I get half a page of junk ads and then maybe some layout of pictures that's unusable for some reason. I could go on and on.

I just hope my beloved del.icio.us never sells out.

Keeping up with, then shooting, the joneses...

[mcc]

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...

Re:So will they finally get rid of that stupid thi

[cmallinson]

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.

Tragedy in the Making

[luna69]

> Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

This is NOT GOOD NEWS.

Yahoo might have some remnant of niftyism about them for having survived this long, but let's face it. Their site(s)

a) suck
b) look like shit
c) use annoying navigation & layout
d) are too Borg-like to attract people who were attracted by Flickr.

I just finshed uploading lots of pics to Flickr, and am now considering removing all of them and cancelling my PAID FOR membership, given this news of Yahoo's buyout.

I joined Flickr because they're NOT Yahoo/MSN/Google/etc. I love the community feel of Flickr, its layout, design, vibe...and I GUARANTEE that Yahoo won't leave it untouched. And even if it did leave the design the same, the changes to the TOS are bound to be evil by definition (as Flickr's were not).