Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Yahoo to Migrate Photos Users to Flickr


Yahoo is planning to shut down its photos site in favor of Flickr, the popular photo sharing site the company bought in March 2005, News.com and Techcrunch reported on Friday.
The move is likely aimed at consolidating the Internet company's web properties, something senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse has made a priority for the company to address after he clamed Yahoo was "spread too thin last year."
Users of the original site will gradually be migrated to Flickr over the next several months, and will have the option to transfer their pictures to that site or choose to export them to either Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery. Yahoo Photos is the largest photo-sharing site on the net, with about 2 billion photos. This is four times the size of Flickr, although the social photo site has been growing much faster than Yahoo Photos in recent months.
Some Comments: 1/ The new and improved yahoo photo's is pretty nice actually. After all the development time and effort I can't believe they are going to ditch it just like that. I tried flickr and I personally don't care for it, I did like yahoo photos though. I guess the storage network to maintain a unlimited quota for pictures is just not worth it to them. Not when they are losing their shirt against google. Gotta save money somewhere right. 2/ Interesting. I'm not sure that the userbase of Flickr is quite the same as it would be for Yahoo! Photos. But I do agree with what was said last year that Yahoo! is spread too thin.

No comments: