Yahoo! buys Flickr, to merge it with 360 and Photos services

Yahoo! just recently declared their much-awaited entry into the blogging world with the announcement of a service called Yahoo! 360. Now they are showing that they are serious towards their efforts with their acquisition of the online photo-sharing site Flickr. The search engine company has yet not announced any details about this purchase but it is quite sure that Yahoo! would be integrating the facilities provided by Flickr into their 360 blogging service.

Flickr is a service currently in beta stage, which allows users to upload, share, and discuss images on the Internet. The images can be given labels and comments by the visitors and can be shared in the blogosphere by incorporating them in Blogs. One of the earliest changes for the end user is integration of Yahoo! user base into Flickr, which means that Yahoo! users would be able to use their services with their Yahoo! ID.

Yahoo! would also be making Flickr a part of their extensive network and incorporating facilities with Yahoo! Photos. This is certainly good news for the existing Yahoo! users who get enhanced functionalities with their old Yahoo! accounts. The company has assured existing developers of Flickr that the basic outlook of the company would remain same. The team would remain same and the service would be working towards launching the 1.0 version of Flickr.

Competition in the form of Google acquired Picasa quite sometime ago which develops an offline photo management software (an excellent one actually) and an image sharing and instant messaging application in Hello. Hello also helps users in sharing photos through Blogger.com based Blogs. Looks like Yahoo! is targeting this facility provided by Google with their upcoming Yahoo! 360 services.

It would definitely be good to see some competition back in the online blogging world. MSN Spaces has largely gone unnoticed. Hopefully, Yahoo! will provide the much-needed excitement…