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Yahoo! Mail just launched new features that make it a little easier for contacts to stay in touch. The first is the ability to send instant messages from Yahoo! Mail to mobile phone numbers, the second is the ability to IM contacts in Yahoo Messenger and in MSN Live Messenger from Yahoo! Mail. There are also customizable themes and key shortcuts.
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Technorati Tags: yahoo, yahoo mail, sms, im
Yahoo’s planned shutdown of Yahoo Photos has begun. The Yahoo blog Yodel Anecdotal reports that they have started to close accounts and transition users over to Flickr. And as promised, users who don’t want to use Flickr are being given the option of moving to Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket instead. “No hard feelings,” says Yahoo, which is also offering users the option of downloading images or having them mailed on a CD. Users have until September 20 to make their final decision.
Yahoo Photos Begins Closing Down
Yahoo Photos is a very different service to flickr, so it will be interesting tos ee how many of the yahoo photos users will feel at home there. It is nice to see, however, that they’re making it easy to transfer photos over to another (what could be seen as rival) service so that users have a full choice.
We’ll just have to wait and see how many unhappy people there will be on September 20th, especially if they don’t move their photos on time.
Also, if yahoo are promoting flickr as an alternative it would be nice to see them increase or remove some of the limits that are imposed as a free user – particularly the maximum number of photos that can be uploaded to your account.
technorati tags:photos, flickr, photobucket, yahoo photos
Flickr is launching in seven new languages this morning. In addition to English, the site now supports French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese. This comes in response to user demand, says the company – over half of Flickr users are live outside of the United States.
read more | digg story
Rumors about social networking site Bebo being for sale come up every few months. First it was British Telecom for $550 million in July 2006 (we started that one), then the Financial Times reported they were in talks with Viacom a month later.
Now, The UK’s Telegraph is reporting that Yahoo is looking, and may pay as much as $1 billion. Just one problem, though. The Telegraph isn’t exactly known for breaking tech M&A stories, and the rumor has an exceptionally weak source – “according to silicon valley gossip” the article says. That sounds like something the Telegraph’s correspondent overheard after ten or twelve cocktails last night at a party. And while I don’t doubt that Yahoo is sniffing around Bebo, $1 billion seems a tad high for the service.
Yahoo would have bid as high as $1.6 billion for Facebook last year according to leaked documents. But Bebo, while large and growing, is far smaller than Facebook. And it’s also smaller than Hi5, Orkut, Friendster and Tagged, according to Comscore.
Yahoo’s Rumored $1 billion Talks With Bebo
As a user of Bebo, I quite like the service, but just what would yahoo buying it achieve? Probably nothing from a Bebo user’s perspective (unless they allow it to link up with something like flickr), but from yahoo’s point of view it’s another place for their advertising rather than google’s
technorati tags:yahoo, bebo, social network