Yahoo Photos is now out of beta–so it seems that web 2.0 is really and truly coming to the masses. Yahoo is the biggest photo-sharing service out there, with 30 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, according to comScore*, and more than 2 billion hosted images, according to the company. And Yahoo Photos (not to be confused with Flickr), has an impressive array of features–drag and drop with lassoing, free unlimited storage, high-res downloads, all the social sharing stuff.
It’s not clear, but it looks as if all existing Yahoo Photo users are going to be migrated to the new service. There have been some doubts about the scalablity of AJAX, and it certainly hasn’t been tried at such a large scale. Many beta testers have complained about the slowness of the AJAX-heavy (though gorgeous) Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Photos has been pushed out the door much faster than its email counterpart, which is still trudging along in beta. In contrast, Yahoo Photos presented at DEMO in February and came out in beta in June…and now it appears to be live.
Hat tip to Elinor.
*Hitwise disagrees, putting Photobucket at number 1.
10 comments so far
1:48 AM PT
but the question is do we need another one of these?
Flickr, and Y!photos, whats the difference. I have pics on Flickr and Y!photos, thoug pics are same i am uploading same in multiple sites.
With almost everyone taking ‘email in’ photos, its better to put photos in some email id and then mail it to these.
Only thing i think good about is that it shows Y!mail attachment also in a different folder
2:09 AM PT
Viplav,
Yahoo! Photos has tens of millions of users. They deserve a Web 2.0 experience without having to download hundreds of photos and take them to another site (whether or not it is Yahoo! owned) which may not allow them unlimited storage or comparable features, print options and photo gifts.
Yahoo! Photos’ and Flickr’s market segments also do not completely overlap.
6:45 AM PT
At the risk of sounding naive, isn’t Gmail AJAX? That seems to have scaled pretty well, without being particularly slow. Digg is also AJAX, and while it’s slow and very niche, I always attributed it to them growing by leaps and bounds, not through any fault of the underlying AJAX technology…
8:36 AM PT
@RJS
Last time I talked to Digg, they said they had 8.5 million unique visitors. And I can’t find good recent numbers for Gmail, but as of the beginning of this year Nielsen//NetRatings said it had 6.7 million users. I just emailed to see if I can get an update.
I have heard inklings about the problems of scaling AJAX (TagWorld, especially, stressed this to me) but I don’t run a huge AJAX site myself. Can anyone help me out with understanding this?
8:56 AM PT
Hey Liz, thanks for the response.
While Digg may only have 8.5 million unique visitors per month, I don’t think that’s probably the best metric to guage the performance of an AJAX-powered site. In Digg’s case, their page views are over 20 million/month. They are a premium AdSense customer, and that is one of the requirements to be a premium publisher.
I’d be curious to see how many page views they actually do get…
9:26 AM PT
You’re right, we should be comparing apples to apples here. AJAX definitely complicates page views, though.
For what it’s worth, Nielsen//NetRatings says Gmail had an audience of 8.6 million in July.
10:21 AM PT
yeah, it’s interesting yahoo would devote resources to revamp yahoo photos when flickr is so well done and pouplar. you’d think they’d just work to make flickr more useable by the more casual photographer and computer user. Seems weird to me. Guess this competes more directly with Picasa Web Albums.
3:34 PM PT
It all really seems counter-productive to me. I don’t see how Y! is helping to monetize Flickr by spreading it’s possible user base out between two similiar services.
8:07 PM PT
Y! photos and Flickr may be similar now with all the AJAX goodness but remember it is all about the brands.
Flickr to its user base, and general public view is seen as a strong brand within the tech/blog community who generally don’t like Y! anything.
It would only weaken Y! overall to try to merge these wonderful properties they own. I think it is wise for them to continue to invest and innovate using both brands as they are doing.
5:58 PM PT
YahooFlickr?
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