The best and first photo sharing site that came out was Flickr, everyone got on it and it really was a community of it’s own. Innovative and ahead of it’s game, everyone wanted a piece of it and they were courted by the Giants, surprisingly Yahoo got it at the end, I was hoping for Google at the time as they let services develop on their own to a degree, but when Yahoo got them I thought at least thats probably better then Microsoft, but it seems time has proven me very wrong.

I have linked below the excellent Gizmodo article on this matter and this describes it perfectly:

This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Link: Gizmodo

Flickr had so much going for it and it was community driven the first thing that yahoo did that annoyed the hell out of me was that you had to log in with your Yahoo ID to get into Flickr, why couldn’t they just keep it on their own. When Flickr was new it kept on giving us more and more features, and I was hoping when its backed by a big guy like Yahoo they would have the ability to develop cool tools faster ways to use the cool site. They were at the forefront of the mobile photography revolution, now everyone snaps pictures with their phones thanks to Apple’s high quality camera’s in the iPhones, you could see the trend from back then, but Flickr couldn’t take a major advantage of this because of Yahoo. Yahoo paid the founders a good chunk of change but for the company (Flickr) to get any funding from Yahoo they had to achieve milestones and those milestones had nothing to do with developing Flickr and more to do with it integrating into Flickr (Yahoo Login Crap). I couldn’t believe that they still don’t have a decent iOS or Android App for Flickr, they could have easily dominated Instagram, they had the community base going with excellent photographers, Flickr had and still has the social networking tools built into it that can bring it back around but now it feels like Flickr is trying to do what it does best but Yahoo is going down and taking all it’s companies with it. It hasn’t really changed much in the last few years, personally I still love it but I want more out of it. Damn you Yahoo!

Same story with Delicious, Yahoo bought them out and years later they were killed off, a simple cool site that Yahoo smothered.