“Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” Mayer said. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp wasn’t on the morning’s call: He was at an all-team meeting. (“Instead of calling his all-company meetings ‘all-hands,’ he calls them ‘all-team,’”Mayer noted. “I think in the future we’ll call meetings at Yahoo ‘all-team’ meetings.”)

“When you look at the best and most-successful billion-dollar acquisitions in the tech space — eBay and Paypal, Google and YouTube — there’s a meme that emerges,” Mayer said. “The best acquisitions…allow the two brands and the two products and services to evolve somewhat separately.”

Yahoo has “well over” 700 million users, Mayer said, while Tumblr has 300 million — but these audiences overlap so little that the companies can count their combined user base at over a billion.

The difference in user demographics, Mayer acknowledged, means there’s “a type of user that will always prefer Tumblr and may never come to Yahoo” — and that’s fine. Yahoo can “provide search seamlessly in the background” for Tumblr, but it could be existing and future Yahoo users that benefit most from the Tumblr acquisition: “As we pull Tumblr content into our news feeds and our media experiences, it will cause the core Yahoo properties to become that much more interesting and that much richer,” leading more users to the site even if they are from “very different [demographic] profiles from people coming to Tumblr.”

Tumblr users should get ready for more ads

Tumblr will remain a separate site, but that doesn’t mean its users won’t notice a few changes — particularly on the advertising front. “There’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that’s meaningful and really additive to the user experience,” Mayer said. Tumblr is already including a few ads in its dashboard, but ”we would like to look at that and understand how we can introduce ads — a very light ad load where the impact is really created because the ads fit the user’s expectation and follow the form and function of the dashboard.”

In addition, Mayer said that Yahoo might allow individual Tumblr users to enable ads on their blogs, “but that would always be done with the blogger’s permission.”

So what about Tumblr CEO Karp’s well-known dislike of advertising? “David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

So, uh, what about Flickr?

In 2005, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing service Flickr. That acquisition, long before Mayer’s time, is widely viewed as a big failure — one that ruined the Flickr experience because Yahoo tried to integrate it, then largely abandoned it.

On Monday afternoon, though, Yahoo is expected to announce updates to Flickr. Could we see a resurgence in that platform, as part of Yahoo’s new “don’t-screw-it-up” acquisition philosophy? Mayer was cautious: “In terms of how Tumblr evolves, it really depends on the creators,” she said. But when it comes to Flickr, “I think it is noteworthy that a lot of the posts on Tumblr are graphical. There’s some obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr, in that regard,” and it’s “probably something we’ll turn our attention to in the future. Flickr could provide great storage for albums or slideshows, things like that. We’ll see.”

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In a blog post, the company described the update, which will be available on Instagram for iOS and Android:

“There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature.”

Tagging someone is different than just mentioning them in a comment, so photos you’ve previously been @-mentioned on will not appear on your profile page immediately.

The focus on people and tagging your friends and favorite coffee shop is quintessentially Facebook, a company that’s always talking about people, whether it’s the launch of Facebook Home and a phone organized by “people instead of apps,” or the re-launch of News Feed with the emphasis on large photos of people.

And by being able to tag businesses, like your favorite coffee shop, in addition to your friends, the update points a clear path to Instagram setting up for advertising, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“I’m really proud of how Instagram is going,” Zuckerberg said on the call Wednesday. “Kevin and his team made incredible progress since last april, and the Instagram community is growing even faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size.”

Zuckerberg said advertising on Instagram is “something we’re thinking about,” which wouldn’t be surprising as Instagram moves into its second year under Facebook’s ownership, a deal that was announced in April 2012, but hadn’t produced many changes to Instagram at first. However, tagging people and having a page aggregating photos of you are both very Facebook-like features, and being able to tag brands would set the company up to create brand-specific Instagram accounts and features like Facebook Pages.

For users, it’s important to note that the “Photos of You” will become visible to your followers on May 16, so you can play around with the feature until then and approve photos before they go live to others.

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Two different products for iOS have come onto the scene recently — Albumatic debuted last week, and Cluster plans to launch Wednesday morning. Both take a modern approach to sharing photos with friends, and they look different from most everything we’ve seen before. The apps themselves are simpler (they involve minimal instructions or tagging), and they make it easy to save photos shared by friends that you want to keep to your camera roll and invite people to albums. Within a few seconds of opening both apps, I clearly understood how they worked and I was able to get something out of them pretty quickly.

The problems with group photo-sharing are clear. I spent Thanksgiving this year with six friends here in San Francisco, and we were all snapping photos on our iPhones throughout the day. By the end of the night, we all wanted each other’s photos for Instagram or Facebook, for sharing with absent friends and parents. But there wasn’t an obvious way to dump all our photos into one big album. We investigated Dropbox and Flock, but neither seemed like a fit, and we ended up using Apple’s photo stream, although it was a clunky solution.

So what could we have used instead? As of this week, we’d have two new options:

Albumatic

With Albumatic, which launched last week, a user can create an album at the beginning of an ongoing event and add friends who are located nearby to contribute photos as the event happens. Users can like or comment on photos, and if your friends are creating events in distant locations, you can follow along and get notifications when they add the the album (although you can’t contribute if you’re not physically there).

It seems like it might contribute to some serious FOMO, but could also be a fun way to keep up with far-flung families, groups of friends in other cities, or destination weddings you can’t attend. And for the event participants who are present and adding photos, it could be a good way to create a record of the event that you can easily share. Albumatic is clearly meant for in-the-moment sharing.

Cluster

Cluster takes a slightly different approach to photo-sharing that I found immediately easier to use, compared to other options, after opening the app. Instead of trying to collect photos from party attendees as the party is happening, Cluster wants you to create an album when you get home that night and let everyone add photos after the fact. It’s a different approach that could work for different people.

Once you create an event and pick your photos, you tell the app which friends were there, and it notifies them to add their photos (using the time and geolocation to suggest photos they might want to add). In testing, the app was quite accurate in picking up which photos I should contribute to events I attended, even in months past.

Cluster seems like it has more post-event potential than Albumatic, but it will be interesting to see how both play out at SXSW in Austin next week and whether one is more conducive to sharing than the other.

This story was corrected at 10:37am to note that you can upload photos in Albumatic from the camera roll as well as take them in the app.

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Swirl takes the hashtagged photos and puts them in a set called a Swirl, but each Swirl is only comprised of photos from people you are friends with or follow. Users can see accompanying tweets and comments and location information. This can be used to collect pictures from the same event or to aggregate photos from friends who are in different locations but reacting to the same event, like the elections, for example. But you’ll need to use Swirl to view pictures from friends organized together by hashtag.

Swirl also allows  people to see what all users are sharing around a hashtag. That can give a Instacane like view on a big topic. But the real draw is making it easy to see what friends are doing.

Summer Bedard, the founder behind Swirl, said she came up with the idea because she wanted a way to see related content from her friends, who were already hashtagging pictures. She said that while other services like Flock or Tracks try to auto-create albums for people using time and location data, she said they don’t always work well. Hashtags are a more deliberate action that leads to more accurate albums, she said.

Bedard said there’s no monetization plans, though she could see an opportunity for brands to use Swirl. She’s also looking at adding photos from more services like Foursquare and Facebook.

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The Instagram rival now has redesigned navigation and live art filters that should keep what was already a good-looking interface competitive, but the biggest development is the addition of a ‘Discover’ feed. Based on suggested tags and other data sources, the feed recommends photos based on friends, locations and topics.

EyeEm, which is nearing a million users, is essentially now in the game of learning those users’ tastes and establishing context. Useful in itself, the Discover feed provides a window into where the company’s heading: and it’s an intriguing future to consider.

“We’re the first ones out there that put every photo on our platform into context, and slice and dice the context,” CEO Florian Meissner told me. “With every photo – where it was taken, whether it was sunny or raining, who was there and so on – we’re building superior search on top of our data cube.”

For example, right now the revamped EyeEm will recommend you photos that were taken around your current location. As the system learns your taste, Meissner suggested, the next step would be to recommend other places that are trending among people with similar tastes. The same idea could apply to topics.

And it’s not just about the user’s tastes, either. EyeEm is pulling in and correlating all sorts of data – the app’s ability to know whether a photo was taken on a rainy or sunny day involves mashing up weather information with Foursquare-derived location data. Some events can be identified and suggested as tags too, for instance where the user is at a concert.

But at the same time, the company is trying to make itself as API-agnostic as possible. Clearly rattled by the recent Twitter shenanigans, Meissner talks darkly about looming “API wars” and says EyeEm is working on its own location database to ensure independence.

So where’s this all leading? “We’re the first ones who organise and structure social photos,” Meissner told me. “We’re building a marketplace for people to acquire licenses from our users.”

Getty, which is involved in a photo hack day with EyeEm and Facebook later this month, is no doubt watching this strategy very closely.

A complementary print business could also be down the line, Meissner added, as could the sale of marketing intelligence. With EyeEm’s seed funding only likely to take the company into early next year, these monetization plans are timely.

EyeEm’s semantic twist on photo-sharing is not entirely unique – Everpix has just come out of beta with a similar idea, albeit paid-for rather than free. But the Berlin firm already has some traction in Japan, South-East Asia, Europe and the U.S., and it does also have that pretty UI.

We may finally be seeing the photo-sharing race entering a new phase, where it’s not so much about who has the best art filters, but who has the best data filters.

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Instagram originated as an iPhone-only app, allowing users to upload, edit, like, and comment on photos only through the app. The startup, which was purchased by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion, has since added an Android app.

While Instagram’s site still doesn’t feature a central feed or direct photo-uploading service, it does allow users greater functionality through their desktops.

Looking to comment on an Instagram photo on your desktop? Clicking on the Instagram URL for a photo, for example here, will take you to the desktop page for that photo, allowing you to comment and like that photo on the web. You can also use the drop-down menu next to a user’s name to follow or unfollow that account.

Here’s an example of what the new “Photo Page” looks like:

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Alyssa Solomon (left) with CakeHealth founder and CEO Rebecca Woodcock (right)

Another Color co-founder has split from the company. Alyssa Solomon, Color’s former CFO and co-founder, has accepted a new role leading business development at consumer health tech startup CakeHealth. She left Color earlier this year and told me Tuesday that she decided to join CakeHealth a couple of weeks ago,

Solomon is the latest executive to leave Color, which announced a live video streaming partnership with Verizon last month after its high-profile flop last year. Last summer, Color lost cofounders Peter Pham and Noah Fiedel, as well as chief product officer DJ Patil. Nine of the original 12 founders (including Pham) are still with the company, Solomon said.

Solomon, who worked on Yahoo Health when it launched in 1999, said she was excited by the company CakeHealth founder and CEO Rebecca Woodcock had created. When John Briggs, an early Yahoo employee she’d worked with who now runs product management for CakeHealth, reached out to her, she said she was intrigued by the opportunity. The San Francisco-based startup, which has been called a “Mint.com for health”, launched last fall with the goal of helping users easily manage their health care. As someone with children, who regularly manages medical expenses, Solomon said she understands its value and could see the business potential.

“The pain point is so obvious, the need is so great. I want to be a part of this,” she said.

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It may not have Instagram’s user numbers, but what EyeEm does now have is wider platform reach. On Wednesday the Berlin firm’s Windows Phone app came out, through a close tie-in with both Microsoft and Nokia.

The release means EyeEm is now available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web, which makes for two more platforms than its biggest rival can manage for now.

“Since starting EyeEm, our vision has been to make photography accessible to anyone, anywhere, no matter what device they are using – to release great photos from peoples’ smartphones and onto a place where they can be appreciated by anyone,” CEO Florian Meißner said.

Instagram doesn’t have a Windows Phone app yet, but let’s be honest, that’s no biggie right now. EyeEm’s proper web service — which received a total makeover less than two weeks ago — is the real differentiator versus its biggest rival.

Why? Because EyeEm has a strong focus on discovery and semantic tagging, which means collaboratively organized, thematically arranged mega-albums.

This takes EyeEm beyond being an Instagram clone (despite its 14 pretty filters) and more into the territory of Flickr or even Pinterest. Ultimately, it could even offer a crowdsourced stock photo service.

All that’s needed are the user numbers, which EyeEm steadfastly refuses to share. I understand part of that’s down to the company waiting to see if their recent influx of Instagram refugees levels off or continues to gather speed, but still: those numbers are critical.

The service is great and many users are passionate, but now we need to know how ready that community is for future expansion.

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But there are some people who’s immediate reactions to the deal may have been a little more complicated: Instagram’s competitors.

It’s not hard to see the deal as bad news for anyone hoping to take on Instagram, which was already the leader in mobile photo apps. Hooking into Facebook’s world-crushing Death Star of a business could easily turn Kevin Systrom’s 12-person app shop into an impregnable dreadnought.

Imagine tying in the social network’s hundreds of millions of users into an already-successful service. Imagine what access to Facebook’s unending engineering resources could do for the product. It could be the end of every one of the thousands of photography apps vying for the public’s attention.

But is there a different take?

Florian Meissner of Berlin-based photo-sharing app Eyeem says that the company spent the weekend getting its new servers online, after an influx of users of the past couple of weeks — many of them fleeing Instagram.

“We started sensing something already two weeks ago,” he told me. “Users started converting to us mostly because they were unhappy about the quality on other services — and that’s really the key for us: enabling our community to decide themselves what they want to see.”

The deal has certainly upset some core Instagram fans, who feel betrayed by a service that many of them saw as the anti-Facebook. Om wrote about the backlash among a number of (Mathew’s roundup of reactions included a brilliant note from a kid who is outraged because “FACEBOOK IS STUPID AND FOR OLD PEOPLE.”

I’ve already seen quite a few people say they now want to switch away, perhaps defecting to services like Path or, indeed Eyeem. And while they may not necessarily be a significant number — certainly not by Facebook’s standards — the foot traffic may be enough to boost those smaller communities.

And of course, even if Instagram remains a separate product inside Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg says that’s something he is committed to), the road of acquisition is rarely entirely smooth. Imagine all those meetings, all that administrative overhead — all small bumps that are probably even more accentuated when you can count most of the employees on your fingers. And that’s before you factor in the time that staff are likely to spend rolling around in their piles of cash.

Cloud or silver lining?

If there is a positive outcome for rivals, the truth is it’s most likely to be a simple one: that Instagram goes mainstream and brings the idea of photosharing to the masses. After all, if everyone who uses Facebook (which means everyone, more or less) will suddenly be introduced to the idea of these apps, that will increase the activity in the space in general.

Still, whatever hope competitors may glean from this blockbuster deal, let’s not pretend that this is rosy news for the thousands of photo-sharing wannabe companies out there. They were all trailing Instagram before yesterday, and now they could be left a long, long way behind.

Sure, they may feel like they can make a little progress while Instagram gets mired in the bureaucracy of joining a big business — but the chances are that whoever they are, they’ll struggle to be heard above Instagram’s roar.

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