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.

So will they finally get rid of that stupid thing

[sulli]

that makes all the photos Flash? Drives me nuts.

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.

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 [archive.org] that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.

Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking [archive.org].

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.

New bubble sighted; investors "Dumbstruck"

[nagora]

Or just dumb. This is like watching a train crash in slow motion, for the second time. Blogs don't do anything, they don't matter, they serve no purpose other than to make their writers feel better about themselves (and each other in that great big mutual back-pat that is the blogosphere). In other words: they're just like all those great investments that fuckwits made in the .bomb bubble.

Corrected headline: "Yahoo waves goodbye to pile of cash"

TWW

Re:New bubble sighted; investors "Dumbstruck"

[HyperChicken]

I don't know much about Flickr, but I don't think it's a blog company. They deal with images, I thought. You upload them, people view them. Right?

Although I do agree that blogs are just a fad.

Re:New bubble sighted; investors "Dumbstruck"

[wootest]

Flickr isn't a "blog" company, they're indeed a photo management company.

"Blogs" are being adopted at lots of places because they mean *communication*. The proverbial angst-ridden teen talking about his/her lunch and how life sucks is communication as much as team members inside a company making decisions is communication. "Blog" is just a buzzword for communication, and it's good in that it has gotten people to adopt it; the form itself may or may not be a fad depending on if some greater way of communication shapes up.

(Personally I think calling this a fad is arrogant - people kept captain's logs and personal diaries centuries ago. But it all hinges on the definition of "blog" and "fad" respectively, I guess; If you mean that people will not start as many "blogs" and that they won't be as hyped in a few years, you may be right.)

Crap

[Bronz]

I for one do not welcome Flickr's Yahoo overlords. I was actually flirting with the idea of subscribing to Flickr after trying it over the last few weeks. Now I fully expect to see a dramatic decrease in the site's responsiveness and a dramatic increase in obnoxious ads.

I for one welcome our new search engine overlords!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope Flickr doesn't go the way of... well, everything else Yahoo seems to get ahold of.

Great

[bogie]

Now all of those cool 3rd party projects will suddently becomes against terms of service.
You can also now probably look foward to having to click "skip this ad" when trying to view photos I'm sure.

The lamest thing that could happen to a cool tech company is to be swallowed up by some big public company. I'm actually not anti-yahoo by any means, I just don't possibly see how this will be good for flickr. And I'm just sure that ipod toting pseudo hipster crowd is going to love paying money to yahoo now.

And finally worst of all is that I'm sure that the previous owners will convince themselves that somehow they will remain independant and that yahoo will just let them run things "like always". Yea right. Anyone want to buy a bridge?

Oh yea

[bogie]

Forgot to mention you can read the flickr takeover faq at the flickr blog. Again not being a naive teenager and as someone who has followed yahoo since it began, why should I possibly believe that flickr won't become some sort of ad-filled yahoo cobranded site? They are already talking about how yahoo id's will now work at flickr. What, flickr is going to be the ONE yahoo property where your not assaulted with flash ads and somehow its going to remain independant?
I will say congrats to the flickr guys. It's awesome that they are going to get paid. Just don't be too surprised when you lose control of things. I look forward to when one of your founders splits off from yahoo in a few years and createst the next cool thing.

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 [archive.org] or this. [archive.org] 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? [wired.com]

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"

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).