SmugMug Buys Flickr, Vows To Revitalize the Photo Service (usatoday.com)

On Friday, Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug announced it had acquired Flickr, the photo-sharing site created in 2004 by Ludicorp and acquired in 2005 by Yahoo. SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he's committed to revitalizing the faded social networking site, which hosted photos and videos long before it became trendy. Flickr will reportedly continue to operate separately, and SmugMug and Flickr accounts will "remain separate and independent for the foreseeable future." From the report: He declined to disclose the terms of the deal, which closed this week. "Flickr is an amazing community, full of some of the world's most passionate photographers. It's a fantastic product and a beloved brand, supplying tens of billions of photos to hundreds of millions of people around the world," MacAskill said. "Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the Internet." The surprise deal ends months of uncertainty for Flickr, whose fate had been up in the air since last year when Yahoo was bought by Verizon for $4.5 billion and joined with AOL in Verizon's Oath subsidiary.

Comments

Re:Could be really good

[ColdWetDog]

Flikr's major problem (aside from spell checkers) is Yahoo.

I've had a Flickr account for ages. When my old email address up and died I lost control of my photos because the idiots can't figure out how to deal with a dead email. They've sent me to all sorts of pages to attempt to resolve my reality but their old data is so fucked up that they're convinced I'm not me.

Sending an actual, physical, printed letter to my permanent address or talking to my credit card companies seems well beyond their capabilities.

So, good luck with this.

(They're also going to have to deal with video. Stills are so 21st Century.)