This move is part of Yahoo!’s strategy to move into blogging and social networking, a rapidly growing area. A few days back Yahoo! had launched a beta version of a blogging tool, Yahoo! 360 for a few select and invited participants.
British Columbia-based Ludicorp’s Flickr has gained a huge popular following for allowing users to personalize photo collections on the web. Users could upload digital photos from computers and camera phones.
A spokesman for Flickr said the website would remain a standalone site for now. Later in the year, the employees would be relocating to Sunnyvale, California where Yahoo! is based. They would then become part of Yahoo!’s innovation and product development team.
Yahoo!’s corporate communication department confirmed the deal but refused to mention the sum for which Ludicorp was acquired.
Yahoo! 360 which was launched less than a week ago is essentially a blogging tool that features many already popular features of Yahoo! such as instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, internet radio, etc. It moves into social networking with features like ‘share’ with which users could share tips and recommendations about movies, places to eat, game titles and gadgets to buy, etc.
Blogging and social networking are currently poised for massive expansion as can be seen from the interest of giants like Yahoo!, Google and even Microsoft. While Google owns Blogger and the social networking site ‘Orkut’, Microsoft had added MSN spaces, a blog product, to its MSN web service in December.
