Yahoo! buys up online picture sharing site Flickr

By Steve Malone

Posted on 22 Mar 2005 at 11:07

In yet another round of search engine follow-my-leader, Yahoo! has bought Canadian photo sharing company Flickr. The acquisition follows a similar move by Google last year when it bought up the Picasa picture sharing website.

The Flickr startup has won many plaudits for its free picture management download software and service. It is reckoned to have around 300,000 members with a staggering 3.5 million pictures online which is growing at around 60,000 a week.

As with Google's Picasa, Yahoo! will no doubt be aiming to integrate the service into its nascent web log and social networking service Yahoo! 360 announced just days ago.

Flickr, whose motto is 'This is not your grandfather's photo sharing site', has become an invaluable tool in the blogosphere via the concept of tagging. Pictures which are posted on Flickr can be named or 'tagged' by their owners. These tags are then indexed by the vertical search engine Technorati.co which specialises in serving the blogging community.

Anyone searching for keywords via the Technorati search tool can retrieve results which can be both blogged articles and pictures. It doesn't take a genius to see how Yahoo! might provide this service itself. Or perhaps the people at Technorati have already had a call from Sunnyvale.

Either way, Flickr is set to become a centrepiece to Yahoo! 360 when it launches at the end of this month. Doubtless we can expect to see MSN making a similar announcement for its Spaces community very soon.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.