PlanetEye

February 2nd, 2008

What’s Ahead for Flickr?

Mark Evans: Director, Community

By Mark Evans

With Microsoft making a hostile $45-billion for Yahoo!, one of the questions being raised by many people is what happens to Flickr.

Will Flickr be ruined by Microsoft or get some much-needed attention given that Flickr hasn’t seen a lot of innovation since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

On Flickr, there’s already a small group of people not happy with the idea of Microsoft being the new owner. According to Wired’s Compiler blog, “Flickr users began posting anti-Microsoft images, satirical “Flickr Live” logos and announcing they will abandon Flickr if it falls into Microsoft hands, fearing such a move would mark the beginning of the end.”

A contrasting take on Flickr’s future within Microsoft is put forth by Thomas Hawk, who suggests a Microsoft-Yahoo deal would being a positive move for Flickr. Here’s what he had to say:
“Flickr comes out a clear winner. Already king of photography at Yahoo after swallowing Yahoo Photos, there is no question that Flickr would become the photosharing site of choice for Microsoft. It would be one of the crown jewels of an acquisition in fact.

More than just having more marketing muscle to push Flickr from an advertising perspective, Microsoft owns the desktop. By creating easy and convenient ways to publish your photos to Flickr directly from the Vista OS, Microsoft would push Flickr from an earlier adopter photogeek sort of site into the mainstream.

Vista already has introduced for the first time photo tagging to the masses, this would tailor well with Flickr whose photo site and especially photo search relies greatly on tagging.”

More: ZDNet suggets Flickr Video will be launched soon, although Yahoo isn’t saying anything yet. Paris Lemon hopes Flickr Video is launched before a deal for Yahoo is completed.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Microsoft, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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2 Responses to “What’s Ahead for Flickr?”

Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and Flickr–what’s next, what’s right, and is it a good thing? Says:
February 5th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

[...] service makes my head hurt (like it hasn’t stopped for a couple days). Thomas Hawk and Mark Evans have both commented on a growing user revolt on Flickr. People who say they will jump ship if [...]
goutham Says:
February 7th, 2008 at 11:51 am

I wonder how flickr and LiveSpace albums are going to either compete/coexist.
- As far as i can tell, Livespace Albums currently do not have the rich community feeling that flickr has
- Flickr has far too many artificial limitations on making it the place to put my personal photos, its more for pros.
- Flickr has much more by way of photo management functionality, and area where Live is slightly behind.

However, a merger could mean that livespace could immediately jump ahead with flickrs photo management, leverage flickrs community (assuming customer relations dont go south with the MS name - which i feel is a silly reason to hate your favorite service) and probably also quickly adopt flickr’s API set which is MUCH richer (selfish of me ).

I am not too sure that being owned by MS will have much effect on the innovation in the short term. Microsoft usually takes the slow and steady approach to innovation, not taking too many risks, but taking small calculated steps to get ahead in the long run.

What is surprising to me is MS, whose core competencies are on the desktop (where there are enough cash cows to milk) taking such a big cash hit to buy yahoo. Will this jeopardize the internal equations which ride so much on the clout brought about by cash reserves? Oh well, i guess Mr. Ballmer and co. know what they are doing..

Here is to hoping Yahoo is not to microsoft what Skype was for eBay