I have to say I have mixed emotions about Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Flickr. While I do wander how the incredibly creative, incredibly innovative, and incredibly elegant Flickr team will fare inside the Yahoo behemoth, I nonetheless am glad to see that incredibly creative, incredibly innovative, and incredibly elegant work can still pay off….

I have to say I have mixed emotions about Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Flickr. While I do wander how the incredibly creative, incredibly innovative, and incredibly elegant Flickr team will fare inside the Yahoo behemoth, I nonetheless am glad to see that incredibly creative, incredibly innovative, and incredibly elegant work can still pay off. So kudos to the folks at ludicorp. They took a “simple” idea (photo sharing), and built something useful that actually rose above the social software hype. Moreover, they did it in way that broke new ground, on both feature set and interaction design fronts. (I wonder if Yahoo will let the Flickr folks continue to so eloquently use Flash and the interaction design possibilities it affords?) While I worry about Flickr becoming the next Blogger (I know, Google didn’t shoot Blogger, but at the same time, I do think Blogger’s innovation rate has significantly declined since being gobbled up by the big boys), I do hold out hope that, with Flickr in the fold, the emerging Yahoo360 could set the new bar in social(able) software. If I were the product manager at MSNSpaces or AOLJournals, I’d be seriously scared.

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