Over the past year, I've been using Yahoo's Flickr, which is a cutting-edge photo sharing site. In fact, the picture here is linked from my Flickr account.
Flickr is easy to use and powerful. A big part of this is because it uses a programming approach called AJAX.
While AJAX has been around since the late 1990s, it was really Google that put it on the map -- with its slick GMail product (the company's latest spreadsheet product is also written in AJAX). Basically, with AJAX, you can do things like drag-and-drop, auto-fill, tags, keyboard short-cuts, in-line editing and so on.
Now, Yahoo! is adding AJAX pizzazz to its companion site, Yahoo Photos. In fact, Yahoo Photos is #1 on the Web, with about 30 million users. In all, there are 2 billion photos.
So far, the new version of Yahoo Photos is in limited beta. However, I was able to interview Harry McCracken, the vice president and editor-in-chief PC World Magazine, who saw the new version at a Yahoo event a couple days ago. According to him:
The new version of Yahoo Photos looks like a promising take on the idea of "Flickr for the rest of us." It's got drag-and-drop image management tools that you might not have guessed could be implemented in a Web browser, it's got a healthy dose of community features like tagging and photo sharing, and it offers unlimited storage at full resolution. All in all, it's the first purely Web-based photo service that might plausibly serve as a relatively sophisticated user's primary management and editing tool.
It's striking that Google's photo play, Picasa, is a very traditional desktop-bound piece of client software, while Yahoo built something that lives on the Internet and really takes advantage of it.
No doubt, the competition in the online photo market is getting intense, with players like Photobucket.com, Webshots.com, and Shutterfly.com.
So, it was important that Yahoo updated its offering. It's also encouraging to see that Yahoo! is also making good use of some of its recent acquisitions, such as of Flickr and Oddpost.com.
Links:
ZDNet - Yahoo rolls out photo site beta
Red Herring - Yahoo Upgrades Photo Site
The week in preview: Focus returns to earnings: Alcoa, Chevron, Family Dollar
Comfort Zone Investing: Survival of the fittest -- letting some banks fail
Three All-American stocks for portfolio fireworks
