Confirmed - Yahoo! Bought Flickr
Thoughts on Flickr and Yahoo
Threadwatch have been talking about the rumous that Yahoo! bought Flickr since Om Malik mentioned it last month. Now it's confirmed by Y!'s Jeremy Zawodny.
To the Flickr Team
Congrats and welcome to the Yahoo family. It's a big one but you're going to be a very big part of it. You have a lot of fans here--probably even more after today. :-)
I know Jeremy's been a big fan of Flickr the social photo sharing site that uses folksonomies and tagging to order and share pics amongst users, for some time. It's clear that he can't quite contain his enthusiasm for the buy in his post heh...
He talks about some obvious things like Yahoo 360 that Tim still hasn't given me an invite to! and says that many parts of Yahoo! will be "flickrized".
This will only go to strengthen Y's good standing in the blogosphere i think, and with their record in RSS integration, i'd say that if anyone could do a good job of treating Flickr right, it's them.
We'll wait and see, there's ample opportunity to cock it right up aswell, hope the dont...
360...
There are no invites yet! :-)
Tim will get you one when they're available, I'm sure.
AHA!
He did ask me if i wanted one, guess he didnt know they were not ready yet, thanks jeremy..
Comment from Flickr's Caterina Fake
Here's what Caterina (co-founder) posted on Flickr earlier today:
view profile
So you're asking: why are you being acquired? Why Yahoo?
We thought about lots of ways to keep Flickr going, growing, and getting better. We considered taking VC money, more angel investment, bootstrapping it and selling.
When Yahoo first approached us eons ago, we were pretty
skeptical. But after meeting the people on the Yahoo team and getting a picture of where they were going, we got religion. Maybe that's too strong. We realized we were all eating at the same church potluck.
The things that were important to us were: being open, building innovative stuff and kicking ass. Were these people OUR people?
Yes. See the stuff Yahoo's announced recently (including, of course,this)? They're evolving in really interesting ways -- and from our look inside, we know know that there's a lot more coming.
Yahoo won't be the Yahoo you've come to take for granted. Competition (with that other company with two O's in its name) has done great things for Yahoo. Dude. The best thing is we no longer have to worry about finance, HR, legal, or things at which we are completely incompetent and were taking our time away from building Flickr. Hot damn.
I'm optimistic
I had wrongly predicted that Google would buy Flickr, but I have to say I'm optimistic about the current situation.
I have been more and more impressed with Yahoo! lately... from the acquisition of kick-ass service OddPost to Yahoo!'s increasingly clueful communications, and -- despite some of the Y! crappiness (ad-laden parts of the service, for instance) -- I think the Flickr acquisition may be a strong and positive signal of stuff to come.
The gnawing worry I do have, though, is how Yahoo! will integrate Flickr without causing the AOL'ification of the service. I don't look forward to the day when Flickr becomes overrun with fratboy Spring Break photos and Brazillian cheescake shots ala fotolog.
In other words... I am worried not about the technical scalability of the service, but the social scalability.
Yahoo!
I have to agree that Yahoo! is getting more and more attractive. I think in many ways they "get it" more than G do. Google seems to have taken a bit of a dip in coolness since IPO, I hope once the new car smell wears off their ferraris they get back in the game. I can see Yahoo! kicking some serious bottom this year ..
Jerry Yang
Here's what Jerry Yang said about it, from Ross Mayfield's blog
Adsense
Jen notes that Flickr has Adsense on thier site and speculates that it may be first in line for public testing of YPN...