USA Today brings some drama to its report on Yahoo’s decision to put all its photo chips in Flickr’s basket.
At Yahoo, Web 2.0 has won one battle with stodgy old Web 1.0.
Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos — for years, the No. 1 or No. 2 most-visited photo site on the Web. Its users will be directed to move their pictures to Yahoo’s hot upstart, Flickr.
Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a “validation” of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print.
“We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people,” says Butterfield, Flickr’s general manager. “People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can’t do that with a printed photo.”
In other news, Yahoo shares surged more than 17% in premarket trading on the rumor that Microsoft has asked Yahoo to enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion. Yahoo’s market capitalization was about $38 billion on Thursday.
