Will Google Buy Community Photo Service?

There has been a bit of quiet rumbling lately that we’ll see a Google aquisition of community photo service Flickr, or perhaps Fotki early next year. With Picasa 2.0 coming (source: USA Today), the word is Google wants the key to the new Picasa’s success to be photo sharing, and Flickr/Fotki would be the key. There’s a few reasons why this could happen:

• Orkut – There’s no shortage of people at Google who are dissapointed with the way Orkut is not catching on. Google really wanted to build a powerful community, and it isn’t going to happen through Orkut. Buying a popular photo service gives Google that, and a great base to build from.
• Google Images – Google hasn’t updated its image index in many months. Yesterday, when I posted about the Zeitgeist 2004, I got my images from Yahoo, because Google Images was bare. Google may be holding off updating the index until its finished negotiating with Flickr/Fotki, and then do all at once. Google Images will get more than just eight months worth of crawled images, it’ll get the entire database of whoever it buy’s users, plus metadata. Sounds like a great press release to me.

Adam Lasnik at BLADAM predicts Google will release Picasa 2 on February 15 (very specific… what does he know?), with the Flickr aquisition coming 45 days later. Picking uo Flickr, with fun attitude, small and smart team, open API, “not-evil” history, and considerably large user base (150,000 users and 1.8 million images, according to Fast Company) would be a great asset to Google, and repair the fact that none of its community products (Blogger, Groups, Orkut) work very well. This is an area Microsoft is making serious and successful moves in, and Google would do well to not cede this battle to Redmond. I would call it a very smart move.