Yahoo! Buys Flickr

1. Yahoo! buys photo-sharing web site flickr.

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Flickr.com (Beta), the photo-sharing web site started by Ludicorp R&D Ltd., a Vancouver, Canada-based company is now a part of Yahoo! and will play a major role in Yahoo! 360, their blogging and social networking community web site set to launch on the 29th of this month.

Flickr allows registered users to upload photos from computers and camera phones, create and share photo albums, blog about and publish public photos; and save, organize, and search for photos by user-defined categories called as tags, among other things.

Read more on the Flickr blog and on CNET News.
Yahoo! Media Relations hasn't written anything about this deal.

I'm a frequent user of Flickr for the last one month, and even though I haven't uploaded many photos as I don't have a digital camera, I've used and liked Flickr's BlogThis, Tags, Zeitgeist, Tags Search, Help, and Set your Blog features.

Flickr's strengths

- BlogThis feature for public photos
- Tags to organize photos
- Give multiple tags to photos
- View photos by searching for tags
- Fast sign up. (Only three text boxes to fill. That's it).
- I like their welcome salutations
Namaste, Hola, Aloha, and many more :-)
- Good documentation
- Black text on White background. Nice and simple.
- Pink and Blue colors for branding looks good
- Variety in photographs
- Login. Search for a tag. View photos.
- Like a photo? Want to blog? Setup your blog.
- Write a post, and publish with the BlogThis feature.
- Use white space to their advantage
- Nice Flickr blog
- Flickr Zeitgeist for blogs
- Flickr photos show up on Technorati

Many congratulations to everyone at Flickr and Ludicorp.

Good luck to Yahoo! for a successful launch of Yahoo! 360, their blogging and social networking service. I am looking forward to its launch and for an invite to try Yahoo! 360 on March 29, 2005.

Request and Suggestions for Yahoo! 360

- Please increase the allowed Flickr photo uploading limit for free users from 10 to 50 MB per month.
- Please allow a maximum of 500 photos to be displayed in a free Flickr account.
- Add a Flickr photos search on Yahoo! Search.
- Allow users to add Flickr photos search on their web site.
- Keep a separate web page for Flickr photos on Yahoo! 360
- Don't fill Yahoo! 360 with a lot of content
- Let each feature of Yahoo! 360 open as a separate page.

2. IAC to buy Ask Jeeves

IAC/InterActiveCorp to buy Ask Jeeves Inc. for $1.9 billion.
(From NYTimes.com - Requires free registration).

IAC owns Expedia, TripAdvisor, Hotwire, Hotels.com, CitySearch, ZeroDegrees, TicketMaster, Match, among other web sites.
Ask is a major web, images, products, local, and news search engine.

This post appears under Yahoo, Flickr, Search, Search Engines, and Blogging categories on Technorati, the blog search engine.