Yahoo: From Dot-Com Survivor to Web 2.0 Powerhouse

Yahoo: From Dot-Com Survivor to Web 2.0 Powerhouse eWeek.com is out with another article, along the lines of a number of other articles published recently elsewhere, about Yahoo! integrating Web 2.0 services into their core offerings. “Through a series of clever acquisitions and in-house creations, Yahoo Inc. has transformed itself from a dot-com survivor into a Web 2.0 powerhouse driven by blogs, podcasts and other forms of user-generated social media.”

Like the other articles on this subject recently, Flickr is brought out as the posterchild for social networked content at Yahoo!

“Another big coup for Yahoo was the acquisition of Flickr, a photo-sharing service built around a tight-knit community of users.

Flickr lets users upload digital images from camera phones and computers and set up photo albums for sharing with the community via blogs and RSS.

Flickr helped popularize the idea of using tags to trigger random associations of images and the result is a slick, wildly popular tool used by millions.

Since the acquisition, Yahoo has already meshed Flickr with its Yahoo 360 social network and a new blog search tool launched within the Yahoo News property.

Interestingly, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake now heads up the My Web 2.0 social search product, a clear indication of Yahoo’s plans for aggressive cross-integration of multiple products.

Horowitz looks at Flickr and sees endless possibilities and, although he is careful to avoid discussing future product plans, there are hints that the Flickr technology can be extended to power things like user-generated audio and video uploads.”