It was officially announced today that Flickr has been acquired by Yahoo. Over the past few weeks rumours were flying about as to who was to get their hands on this rather ingenious piece of coding. Most noteably Google and Yahoo were at the top of the list, amongst several venture capitalists wanting a piece of the action.

After some diliberation, it seems as though the folks at Yahoo saw eye to eye with Ludicorp (parent company of Flickr) as to how Flickr was to be managed and further produced. Over the next coming months, many parts of Yahoo will be “flickrized.” Yahoo 360, which hasn’t even been released yet will also have some influence from the flickr.

I first started playing around with flickr back in October of 2004. I thought it was pretty neat, with its clean and easy to navigate interface, relatively intuitive procedures, and an overall unique concept. Seeing as I like photography, I grew a liking to it rather quickly. It wasn’t until more recently in January of 2005 that I actually started paying more attention to this site, using it to its fullest. I even bought myself a Pro account on February 28, 2005 hoping to make a potential cutoff date (of March 1, 2005) for potential benefits of being a Pro member before the acquisition. Sure enough, in the official announcement made by the flickr team, it mentioned that Pro account holders will get “super, mega bonuses.”

Many things can happen in situations like this and I’m afraid to envision the worst of what can become of flickr. However, seeing as I was always fond of Yahoo and its services, I am somewhat relieved that it was Yahoo that did the acquiring. I see many similarities with Yahoo and flickr and hope that they can coexist in a happy family. I am hoping – as others are too I’m sure – that things will only get better for flickr. I’m wondering if flickr will get a sudden influx of users now that it is part of the Yahoo family. I know many people were quite fond of the small communities that were built within flickr and are afraid of that being destroyed by these newcomers.

Regardless, I hope to see bigger and better things for flickr and surely hope that this decision was one for the better. Good luck to Ludicorp and flickr!