The future of Flickr

Om Malik broke the news this afternoon that Yahoo! is pursuing Flickr. I can’t help but think this is bad news for the Flickr community. While Yahoo!’s servers would ease the growing pains Flickr has been suffering recently — the site has been down three times in the past week — I’m afraid that Yahoo! will integrate Flickr into the rest of its cluttered portal site. Yahoo! will likely tie Flickr in with Geocities, Mail, and even its Calendar service. Of course, banner ads and likely pop-up ads will start appearing, even for the paying customers. I hope Yahoo! doesn’t up the Pro account fees or change the policy on unlimited storage. Of course, this is all just speculation at the moment, but it does make you wonder if Flickr is starting a downward spiral. I sure hope not, because I’m a big fan of the service and currently have over 2,000 photos on the site.