[LINK] "At Flickr, fending off rumours and Facebook"

[rfmcdonald]

Please tell me I won't have to back up my Flickr account over at Google Picasa.

Speculation in technology circles that Yahoo might close or sell Flickr, its photo-sharing service, prompted an emphatic denial this month.

“Is Yahoo committed to Flickr?” Blake Irving, Yahoo’s product chief, wrote in a message on Twitter. “Hell yes we are!”

The confusion over Flickr’s future was perhaps understandable. Yahoo had just recently disclosed plans to shut down or otherwise dispose of several other Web products, including the bookmarking service Delicious, and some users feared Flickr would be next.

A pioneer in combining photos with social networking features, Flickr is facing a stiff challenge from newer services. In addition to fighting rumours, it is having to work hard to keep its users returning as Facebook widens its lead as the popular destination for sharing party, vacation and family snapshots.

Although Flickr is well known and still widely used, its traffic is shrinking. Unique visitors to Flickr in the United States fell 16 per cent, to 21.3 million, in December compared with a year earlier, according to comScore. Meanwhile, for that same time frame, use of Facebook’s photo features grew 92 per cent, to 123.9 million users.

Flickr’s trajectory largely dovetails that of Yahoo, which is struggling to re-emerge from years of underperformance. Carol A. Bartz, the company’s chief executive, is leading a turnaround effort that includes jettisoning products that are not central to her strategy of emphasizing Yahoo’s strengths.

Other than the recent support on Twitter, Yahoo’s top executives have barely mentioned Flickr publicly for some time. Few top executives actually have a public Flickr account.

No one questions Flickr’s appeal to photographers who post, admire and comment on a wealth of artistic images, many of which are magazine quality. Where Flickr is faltering is with people who want to store and share more mundane snapshots.