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Some Photobucket users trying to access the site on Tuesday afternoon were sent to an incorrect page as a result of an error in the site's DNS hosting services, according to an e-mail from the Photobucket support team.

The error was fixed within an hour, but some users were not expected to regain access to the site for a few hours as the fix was rolled out.

"It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect," the e-mail said.

Wow, that was fast!

I contacted Photobucket parent Fox Interactive early Thursday to find out why the site censored a bunch of photos of babies in diapers posted by diaper company Good Mama Diapers. In separate e-mails, a Fox spokesman and Photobucket customer support said the hundreds of photos were deleted because they depicted "nudity" in violation of the site's terms of use.

Hours later I received word from Good Mama Diapers that Photobucket admits that it erroneously dumped the photos.

"My team has reviewed the images that were tossed in your account and it was determined that the images that were removed from your account should not have been removed. We have the images available to restore and are currently in the process of restoring them. Please accept our sincere apologies for the error," writes Monica M. Massad, content moderation manager at Photobucket, in an e-mail.

"It is true that we reviewed our content moderation guidelines to make sure it was in line with Photobucket's terms of service and it made us more strict on child nudity, however, we were over-censoring in this case and are working to rectify that."

Photobucket is also upgrading Good Mama Diapers' account to a pro account for one year.

Updated 3:15 p.m. PDT with Photobucket acknowledging its error and restoring removed images.

Photobucket is removing photos of babies in diapers from the site, saying they violate the terms of service because they depict "nudity."

Banned from Photobucket. This photo of a happy, diaper-sporting baby was one of hundreds of such images deleted from Photobucket because they depict nudity.

(Credit: Good Mama Diapers)

Diaper company Good Mama Diapers sponsored a diaper photo contest on Photobucket and posted hundreds of photo submissions on the photo-sharing site over the past 10 weeks or so. On Wednesday, Jessica Thornton of Good Mama Diapers logged on to the site and noticed they were all gone.

Thornton e-mailed Photobucket customer support to find out what happened. She got a reply saying that the site recently changed its content moderation policies regarding images of children and that the photos violated the new policy, which prohibits content that contains nudity.

"While we understand that in a family album type of setting, these images are innocent, we must remove the content because of the nudity and believe that this restriction is in the best interest of children's safety," the Photobucket e-mail says. "This policy applies to all accounts, public or private. We ask that you keep these images on your personal computers and not host them on Photobucket.com."

Thornton, with images of diaper commercials on television swirling in her head, then asked Photobucket customer support for a clear definition of what constitutes "nudity." How is it nudity when the babies are wearing diapers?

In its unintentionally humorous response, Photobucket writes as if only one image had been removed and describes it as "an image of a baby with his/her diaper falling off, exposing his/her butt. We do not allow images of children or adults exposing there (sic) naked butts."

Indeed, there was one photo that was a take-off of the famous Coppertone tanning ad with the dog tugging on the toddler's bathing suit, Thornton says. But what about the hundreds of others?

Dan Berger, a spokesman at Photobucket parent Fox Interactive, issued this statement in response to questions about the situation: "Per its terms of service, Photobucket removes all pictures that include nudity, regardless of the subject's age, in order to ensure the safety and security of its users."

That doesn't satisfy Thornton, who lost the hundreds of photos and countless hours spent posting the images on Photobucket.

"It's just horrible being made to feel like you've done something shameful when we're in the cloth diapering business," she says.

Update: After this blog was posted, Photobucket informed Thornton that it had erred in censoring the photos and said it would restore them.

Yahoo Photos' loss is Flickr's gain.

Flickr's market share has risen as Yahoo Photos' has dropped.

(Credit: Hitwise)

Yahoo began shutting down Yahoo Photos last month, and now Flickr passed it to become the No. 2 photo-sharing site in terms of Internet traffic in the United States, according to monitoring firm Hitwise.

Flickr now has 6.42 percent of the visits to photo-sharing sites, up from 4.57 percent in March, Hitwise said.

That's a significant jump, but it's not all Yahoo might want: Flickr's 1.85 percentage-point increase was more than offset by Yahoo Photos' 2.6-point drop from 5.79 percent to 3.19 percent. And Flickr also got a boost from incorporation of its images into Yahoo's search at the end of June.

Flickr remains a distant second in U.S. traffic compared with Photobucket, which rose from 41.4 percent market share to 43.52 percent in June, Hitwise said. However, Hitwise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said on her blog, "It is worth noting that Flickr has a truly global footprint and has greater share of the photography category in other markets."

Earlier today it was made official, after much speculation, that Photobucket had been acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. CNET News.com spoke with Photobucket CEO and co-founder Alex Welch on Wednesday morning to hash out some of the rumors and talk about what's in store for the popular image-sharing site.

According to Welch, the company put itself up for sale in order to accelerate growth beyond its current membership base of approximately 42 million. "When we look at Fox, it was really a natural choice for Photobucket because we really want to grow out our brand globally," he said. "It was really about taking that next step much sooner and much faster."

Rumors had suggested that the acquisition would be on the part of the Fox Interactive-owned MySpace, but as it turns out, Photobucket will be an individual Fox Interactive property--not a division of MySpace. "All of our discussions have been directly with Fox Interactive Media," Welch explained. "Photobucket is going to be acquired by Fox Interactive, and Photobucket is going to remain a standalone company within Fox Interactive."

Photobucket will indeed remain intact, but Welch said that the company has "a very detailed product roadmap over the next couple years" concerning its new involvement with Fox Interactive. He hinted that some of the company's other brands, like gaming site IGN.com, may come into play.

Tech news junkies have probably been wondering exactly how the deal came to fruition, considering the much-publicized spat between Photobucket and MySpace when the social networking site decided to block all videos and slideshows from Photobucket last month. The conflict, which stemmed from Photobucket's advertising tie-ins with Spider-Man 3, was eventually resolved. But then acquisition rumors started to swirl, and it all seemed a little bit disjointed.

Obviously, a lot of the details can't be publicly disclosed. But Welch was able to say that that was because Photobucket had been in discussion with Fox Interactive, not its MySpace division. There hadn't initially been much communication between the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive and the terms-of-service debate with MySpace. "We'd been in discussion with a number of parties, including Fox. The incident that happened was between Photobucket and MySpace, not Photobucket and Fox. It was an isolated incident," Welch said. "We resolved the issues by opening up discussions between the companies," and then the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive were able to continue while Photobucket's widgets returned to MySpace.

From what it sounds like, things appear to be running smoothly now.

The announcement from Fox Interactive on Wednesday also revealed that, as rumored, the company had acquired media mashup tool Flektor. But Welch said that there isn't any immediate collaboration between Photobucket and Flektor--yet. Instead, Photobucket is going to focus on its own growth. "As of right now, we're going to continue to build our our toolset to really satisfy our users, to give them really interesting things to do with media."

It's official: MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media has formally announced its agreements to acquire image-sharing site Photobucket and slide show mashup creator Flektor. Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of media giant News Corp.

Both acquisitions had been rumored for some time. The Photobucket deal, originally reported earlier this month, is inarguably the more significant of the two: Photobucket, after all, is the 34th most visited site on the Web, with over 42 million users and 17 million monthly visitors. Its history with Fox Interactive Media hasn't been smooth: There was well-publicized friction between the two companies when MySpace blocked Photobucket's embeddable video and slide show widgets in April, citing a terms-of-service violation related to a Spider-Man 3 advertising campaign. Later in April, Photobucket announced that an accord had been reached with MySpace, and within weeks, the acquisition rumors began to fly. The rumored price has been about $250 million.

In a post on Photobucket's official blog, co-founder Alex Welch wrote that "we expect nothing to change in our day-to-day operations," and that "the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM."

As for Flektor, reputedly a $10 million to $20 million purchase for Fox Interactive Media, initial reports circulated on TechCrunch several weeks ago. Flektor, which lets people edit audio, video and photos to create their own embeddable slide shows, was founded just last year.

Photobucket and Flektor, however, will not become MySpace properties as many of the early reports had hinted; they'll instead be Fox Interactive Media brands, alongside MySpace as well as IGN.com and Rotten Tomatoes.