Flickr and Bloglines: Bought and Sold

Two of my all-time favorite web apps were bought over the weekend: Flickr by Yahoo!, and Bloglines by Barry Diller.

I was actually a little late to the Flickr bandwagon, only picking it up in July last year, but I bought a pro account the first day they were available because I loved it so much. I had tried several methods of getting my pictures online before I discovered it, but none had a low-enough bar to encourage me to post more than once every few weeks. Flickr’s low bar, combined with Stewart and Caterina’s devotion to the requests and bug reports from their users, gives me the utmost confidence that they won’t compromise the values on which the community was built. And Yahoo!’s no AOL, so I hope that they can expand their business without sucking the life out of a valuable new property.

I’m a little less sanguine about the just-announced sale of Ask Jeeves to Barry Diller. He’s not all bad: he has spoken out against media consolidation. But he’s certainly not a “cool tools” type of guy, and I think he sees dollar signs rather than innovative new technology. This is the same guy who came up with Ticketbastard, after all.

March 21, 2005 - 09:43 AM