Yahoo
Yahoo! Photos to Shut Down in Favor of Fickr
I’m a huge Flickr fan, so I’m glad to see Yahoo cut the peanut butter and close down Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr.
Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
Best part: they’re not trapping user photos. How’s that for a show of confidence in Flickr?
Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr – instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly.
Good thing ImageShack isn’t on the list. Kudos to Yahoo for sharpening its focus in this area without trapping data. Just to show you what Flickr can do, above is a slideshow featuring photos from Anime Matsuri 2007, crossposted from Anime Mashups.
Yahoo! Messenger for the Web
Catching up to Google’s and Microsoft’s browser-based Ajax chat offerings, Yahoo just released a browser-based Flash version of Yahoo! Messenger at webmessenger.yahoo.com. Avatars, emoticons, history, and MSN Messenger integration available at launch; VoIP to follow. As always, Microsoft is the loser in this area: both Yahoo’s and Google’s Web IM offerings are snappier than theirs.
On a country-specific note, this’ll be a hit here in the Philippines. The vast majority of online Filipinos use Yahoo! Messenger, and either go to dinky Internet rental shops or sulk behind medieval corporate firewalls.
(Via Michael Arrington.)
