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Valleywag is reporting that MySpace has acquired Photobucket. Although no one has the financial details of the deal but the price tag is rumored to be between $250 - $300 million. The two companies had a thorny past with MySpace twice banning Photobucket videos and photos on MySpace. The latest ban led to a lot of PR for Photobucket and was later lifted. Apparently the acquisition talks were a reason behind the removal of the ban.

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and rode the MySpace bandwagon as a backend photo-storage service for MySpace users. Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenues last year and estimate to hit the $25 million revenue mark this year. The site has 40 million registered users.

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ImageShack, a photo sharing site used by people to host their images to be displayed on their social networking profile pages has added video uploading and sharing capability

ImageShack is claiming that their video hosting feature is more advanced than the ones offered by Youtube, Revver and others, since ImageShack will pre-process your video on your system instead of first uploading it to their servers and then processing it their. The pre-processing involved file compression which could reduce a file by nearly five times its original size making the file uploads a much quicker and less bandwidth consuming task.

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Multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo has decided to pull the plug on Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr, a photo sharing service they acquired in March 2005.

Although Yahoo Photos still massively trails flickr, hosting 2 billion photos against Flickr’s 500 million, but the growth of Yahoo Photos has stalled or rather declined during the past year. From April 2006 to April 2007 visitors to Flickr rose by 22% whereas Yahoo Photos lost 60% of its user traffic according Hitwise Intelligence.

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MySpace which recently blocked Photobucket from their site has now lifted the ban and MySpace users could see their Photobucket videos, photos and slideshows on their profile pages once again. The revelation has been made by Alex, CEO of Photobucket on the Photobucket blog.

Some funny points in the announcement are: Read the rest of this entry »

Photobucket, which just launched new and enhanced video editing features, is reporting that the photos and videos hosted by Photobucket have been blocked by MySpace. This has now happened for the second time, with a similar incident taking place in January 2007. On that occasion MySpace`s response was that they were merely trying out a new filter to prevent security breaches on MySpace. The blockage was imposed at around 10:30 PM Pacific Time, and is really serious.

This sort of blocking has become a regular behavior at MySpace, and they usually lay the blame on security issues, terms of service violations or other such crap. MySpace has previously shut down all Flash widgets in January for a couple of hours, then blocked Imeem, and after that permanently blocked Vidilife, Stickam and Revver. No matter what the reason MySpace assigns, the blockage really hits the startups hard. Revver is struggling for its mere existence ever since the ban.

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Picli, is yet another startup that is using Digg like ranking in its service. The startup allows users to submit and then rate photos. It has all that is there to be offered by a Digg like service such as viewing, voting, commenting, flagging and tagging.

The only difference is that they are calling the frontpage as Showcase, where as the upcoming remains unchanged. They plan to add a special section for photography and natural media shortly.

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Photobucket has launched a real time video uploader. The uploader allows Windows users to instantly upload clips using the drag and drop functionality and share the moment it is uploaded without any time lag. This is really a great achievement and will spur growth as there is nothing that users love more than “instant gratification”. Users could also trim and slice the beginning and end of videos before uploading and upload directly from the webcam using their new real-time encoding client.

Another new enhancement is Remixing. Users can now mashup any videos or photos from their album, add captions, bubbles and party favors like hats, noses and eyeballs. Photobucket initially has 500 songs in there collection and a selection of videos to remix from.

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Fliptrack has raised $1.5M in Series A funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures and have launched their service. Fliptrack allows users to generate slide shows of their photos and sync them with music.

Photo slideshows is a saturated market with Slide, RockYou and Photobucket trying to cut eachothers throat. The distinctness of Fliptrack in this cut throat competition is the ability ot sync music of your choice with the slideshows. The web editer is extremely easy to use and is almost automated. All you need to do to make a FlipTrack, a slideshow on the service, is to pick a music track and upload your desired photos from your pc, website or the social network that you are using. The rest is their job.

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Flickr has just introduced filters into its system as a measure to seriously come down on porn.

The entire system is bundled with the safety level (safe, moderate, restricted) and Content Type (photo, art/illustration, screenshot). So you could set your current preference and also tell flickr what type of content (safe screenshots for ex.) you upload. The search filters are also updated and you can now turn them on and off while browsing. Users can now also hide their photo streams from others and third party access via API. Furthermore the “Flag this Photo” feature now allows you to flag any thing that might be offensive, the Organizr has been upgraded accordingly.

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Google announced major improvements to Picasa Web Albums today. According to the official Google Blog:

A new Community Photos search feature helps you discover and explore the public web albums of others on the site. Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)—that’s room to post and share around 4,000 standard resolution photos. And we’ve made albums and photos easier to link to from any email, IM or website—simply copy and paste the code we show you.

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