Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr

Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool.

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things.

Joanna Stevens, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, confirmed the deal Sunday but did not disclose the terms.

"We look forward to working with them for their innovation and product development across the Yahoo Network in the coming months," she said.

Stevens said Flickr will remain a standalone site for now. The company's employees, however, will relocate to Sunnyvale later this year.

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced Yahoo 360. The service combines a new blogging tool, along with several longtime Yahoo products, including instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio. It also offers tools for sharing recommendations about places to eat, favorite movies, music and so on.

Both the 360 move and the acquisition of Flickr and parent company Ludicorp Research & Development come as social networking and blogging draw increased interest from rivals. Microsoft in December added a blog product for its MSN Web service, called MSN Spaces. Google, meanwhile, owns Web log service Blogger and social networking site Orkut.

CNET News.com's Evan Hansen contributed to this report.

The Yahoo Flickr deal shows photo sharing is the next killer app

I think this deal should be interesting for the 2 companies. Yahoo needs to feed its customer base with new services and Flickr will reach a big audience to promote its services. Of course, acquisition is a risky business but that is part of the deal.

Nevertheless, this deal (and see the Hello/Picasa - Google one or HP - Snapfish) shows that online photo sharing is one of this future killer app for internet users.

But the next big concern for photo sharing services might be the related infrastructure costs (mainly bandwith, storage and servers) while they are expanding.

We, the PixVillage Team, provide an answer using P2P technologies as a way to share photos privately. First it is a legal use for P2P technologies, then it offers fast, fully scalable, free and unlimited online photo sharing to its users. And we do not support any infrastructure costs. As of today, around 1.000.000 photos have been shared by our users.

Have a look at http://www.pixvillage.com and tell me what you think...

Pit.