Microsoft is readying a Flickr competitor

The big news out of Redmond today is that Microsoft is working on a Flickr competitor.

A job posting on the software giant's career site reveals that the Digital Memories Experience Team is trying to recruit a program manager to lead the project.

"This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video-sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug, and other photo Web solutions today," according to the posting. It's clear who the competition is.

Flickr has a really strong and popular product right now, so if Microsoft wants to be competitive in this space, it will have to put out a phenomenal product with enough incentive to pull users away from the Yahoo service.

One thing that, in my opinion, has hurt some of Microsoft's online efforts recently is the lack of an open platform and open data. Flickr's main strengths lie in that they make it very easy for users to download and upload photos through a variety of methods. Much of this is made possible through Flickr's developer application programming interface, or API, and also through first-party support.

I am happy to see Microsoft entering this space and creating more competition, but it really needs to focus on making sure that the service plays nicely with a variety of download and upload methods. This will be a welcome replacement to Microsoft's current photo-sharing solution in Windows Live Spaces, whose photo resolution could stand to be bumped up.

Via Long Zheng

[phunkE]

Great but I have low expecations

I normally would have had high expectations from Windows Live. If this is going to be a Windows Live product that is. But with all the failures of Windows Live, and not giving the user nearly enough options, I don't have high expectations for this. I hope it proves me wrong though, that would be really cool. And NO LIMIT on the amount of photos like FlickR would be really great. 200 is lame. Spaces however doesn't have a limit, so maybe there won't be one for this either.