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While there's been no official word from either company, confirmation is out
on the Web that Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) 
has acquired Flickr, the photo sharing company. Rumors
of such a deal have been circulating for weeks.
Flickr is a Web-based photo sharing system that allows users to add tags to photos, making them easy to search. Not only can the person who posted the photo create tags and write comments, but so can the people invited to view them.
ZDNet reported Sunday that Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang announced the acquisition during an interview. Attempts to obtain further comment from Yahoo were not fruitful.
Deal Confirmed
Today, Catarina Fake, Ludicorp vice president of marketing, wrote in the Flickr blog, "Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp." Ludicorp is the developer of Flickr. The company's management team will remain in place.
Yahoo platform engineer Jeremy Zawodney also blogged about Flickr.
"The first time I used Flickr, I knew it was something different and something important. It took me a while to figure out and try to articulate exactly what that was, but I took my first swipe back in September when I called it a Next Generation Web Service," he wrote today, also confirming the transaction.
More Than Photos
Zawodny said that he imagines Yahoo 360 being "Flickrized." Yahoo 360 aggregates many of Yahoo's services --
including instant messaging, photo storage 
and sharing, and Internet radio --
adds a new blogging tool and offers ways to share recommendations on books,
music, restaurants or anything else. It is now in
invitation-only beta testing but is expected to be released in a public beta at
the end of the month. Flickr itself is still in beta, and was scheduled to launch in the summer.
According to reports, features of Flickr will be added to Yahoo Photos, but the two services will remain separate for now. Users will be able to log into Flickr using a Yahoo ID or their Flickr ID.
"Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs,
and will remain separate for the foreseeable future," Fake wrote.
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