Who Is Buying Flickr?

There has been a lot of buzz recently on the internets regarding the eventual buyout of Flickr, either by Google, Yahoo!, or any other major web company. According to Matt over at FlickrCentral:

Yahoo! is either buying or not buying flickr.

In the same thread over at FlickrCentral, Caterina says:

We talked to a guy at Business 2.0 back in November or December — that was the start of all these rumors — and we got the sense he was fishing for a story that wasn’t there.

Of course this doesn’t surprise me anymore. Reporters have quoted Stewart as saying something I said, quoted me as saying the opposite of what I said, omitted the material part of what I said and published just the subordinate clauses….

But it’s still kind of fun having all these people talking about us. Makes us feel like the popular kids at high school. Who’s dating who!!!!

In response to all these rumors, the folks at Flickr had a little fun and changed the logo this morning, which shocked me at first, but upon closer inspection, I realized the amazing humor in the change. Sadly, its back to normal now, but a lot of people have things to say about it.

In all seriousness, I can see how a buyout of Flickr is a sound business move for all parties. The larger company gets a large, creative and passionate user base, a great social networking tool, and some innovative and well-thought out technology, while Flickr gets much needed funding and access to resources such as photo-printing services and more.

As much as I love Google, they already have Picasa and Hello.com, which are both now really well integrated with Blogger. Do they need something like Flickr? Probably not. Yahoo! on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a networking interface with Yahoo! Photos, and the user base of Flickr would come in handy.

Ideally, Apple would buy out Flickr, but they’re more of the kind of company that would build an application rather than purchasing one to go with the amazing iPhoto. So in the end, I think if anyone is going to buy Flickr, it will be Yahoo, and as long as they let Ludicorp still manage everything, I don’t see how this is going to be bad for us Flickr users.

I guess now we just wait and see.