Yahoo Photos shutting down. Flickr is the new hotness.
Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo and author of the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto," in which he told people inside Yahoo that the company was spread too thin, told me tonight at a dinner that "I'm eating my own peanut butter." On Friday, he said, Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought about two years ago.
Flickr is about more than storing photos; it's about finding other users' good shots, too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn't the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so people will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery.
This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared toward serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it's the black sheep of popular photo sites--it's got a different organizational system from most sites, it's more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.
As with most big Yahoo service changes, this transition will take several months.
If you have shots on Yahoo Photos and need to figure out what to do with them, I do recommend giving Flickr a whirl. It's a fast and flexible sharing system for which smart people are building some very clever apps and mashups. It's not based on the standard "album" metaphor that most photo sites use, but when was the last time you put your digital photos in a printed album?
For more on this development, see TechCrunch. For help getting up to speed with Flickr, see the Webware Newbie's Guide to Flickr.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Since my ISP is AT&T they throw in unlimited photo storage. I have over 2 GB of photos.....what to do now. :-(
zooomr.com directly competes with Flickr and offers unlimited
storage. I used both for a few months before settling on Flickr.
Both have their strengths and weaknesses but you may prefer
zooomr.
Does anyone actually use this website any longer? Seems like the perfect purchase for Microsoft - 2 years too late to everything.
Yahoo! can buy anything it wants - Flickr or whatever - it's still Yahoo! You dress up a pig but it's still a pig.
223 million registered users
#1 in reach in the US - 75% of all online users come to Yahoo! monthly
#1 URL in the world, 10 years running ? Homepage www.yahoo.com
#1 in Personalization ? more online users personalize their Start Page with Yahoo! than with any other portal
yea, i would say Yahoo! is still around. in the words of my Geico caveman friend, "maybe next time do a little research."
- All about the money
- by ecokev May 13, 2007 8:26 PM PDT
- It's such a pity that they are closing down Yahoo! Photos. Personally I have a lot of downloading to do. I won't move to Flickr as they have a ridiculously high annual fee for unlimited storage while competitors can do it for free. Bad move on Yahoo!'s part, I'm sure they will lose more than they will gain from this decision
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