Sharing is Caring: Yahoo! and Flickr
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Written By Reprise Media | March 21, 2005 | Share This
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Recently, the buzz surrounding social bookmarking, folksonomies, tagging, and the like has remained mostly that - just buzz. Even though these content technologies and their applications present interesting and exciting possibilities, there’s been little substantive proof of any real business viability.
Until now.
The Yahoo! acquisition of Flickr represents a major entity stepping up to acknowledge both the credibility and profit-making potential of such an application.
Jeremy Zawodny said , “The first time I used Flickr, I knew it was something different and something important.” But, like us, he didn’t quite know the why and what of that sentiment. Sure, Flickr is cool, but we didn’t see it as a standalone business.
That’s not to say that we’re about to hit another 2000-esque bubble. Today’s market is being built very differently than the dot com bloat of the past.
‘Net-nouveau Companies like Flickr are aware of this. Instead of trying to quickly hype (and IPO) a company, they focus on developing a smart application with useful features that position it as an add-on to existing services. They eschew multi-million dollar SuperBowl ad campaigns and attempt to develop organic buzz around their brand, eventually nestling under the wing of bigger corporations (in this case, Yahoo!) who can give it the support it needs during the vital incubation period.
It’s interesting to look at the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo! when it comes to integration of these standalone apps. Google’s got its hand in a lot of cookie jars, what with the acquisitions of Blogger, Picasa, Keyhole, and others. Yet they’ve done little to fold in these products with their services, as Yahoo! claims to be doing with Flickr (Yahoo! 360 is a big first step in this direction).
You could almost liken it to a child who hoards all the toys just so others can’t have them, even though he’s not playing with them. But maybe that’s because the child is using all the toys to create something brilliant, so we’ll forgive the behavior for now.
Topics: Advertising: Distribution, Investment, M&A, Open Source, Search: Innovations |