• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 22, 2005

Yahoo! has agreed to acquire online photo-sharing service Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, president of Ludicorp Research & Development, confirmed yesterday. Ludicorp launched Flickr in beta a year ago. Flickr's management team will remain in place, and will continue to pursue the release of a full version 1.0 of the service, Butterfield said.

Butterfield would not discuss terms of the deal, which was widely rumored over the Web and the blogosphere for the last two weeks.

Flickr allows users to upload digital photos and assemble them into albums, which can be posted on blogs and shared with other like-minded netizons. The service has gained widespread appeal among experienced Internet users for its community-based approach to organizing and sharing digital images on the Web.

The news comes just one week after Yahoo! unveiled its plans to launch a combined social networking and blogging service called Yahoo! 360, which allows users to incorporate a list of personal content, including digital photos, into their blogs. The service will be available at the end of March--by invitation only at first.