USAToday:
Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves, MacAskill said in an exclusive interview.
This news will be met with mixed feelings from a lot of photographers but there is no doubt that Yahoo has let the service languish for many years.
I don’t see how it could be worse than what Yahoo did to it (which was nothing…)
At least SmugMug is a photography company. I’m not even sure what Yahoo is these days.
Time will tell. I’ve been on Flickr since it started and it’s been dying a slow death by neglect since yahoo bought it. Hopefully smugmug will give it some attention.
I’m not sure Yahoo ever knew exactly what they were.
Could be interesting. I haven’t kept up with how well Smugmug is doing for themselves ever since I ruled them out as a freelance work prospect.
Do we need a new username and password or did SmugMug just buy our old Yahoo ones off a website?
why would there be mixed feelings? Yahoo trashed Flickr
Once upon a time, Yahoo had a clear sense of what they were. They were a portal. Once upon a time, portals were central locations on the internet. Then google came along and obviated that whole class of things. Since then, it’s been hard for the portals to find a way to stay relevant — To the point that some people like you can’t even see how they ever had any purpose at all.