Yahoo! acquired Flickr, costing the tech giant $22 to $25 million. During the next couple of months, all Flickr contents were migrated from its servers in Canada, to Yahoo!'s servers in the U.S..
The acquisition was meant to strengthen Yahoo!'s position in the photo sharing community. The company has even announced that it would close down Yahoo! Photos, encouraging users to migrate to Flickr.
Flickr was introduced a year earlier on February 2004. Created by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The service emerged from tools that were meant for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game.
Because the Flickr project took off almost immediately, it was proven to be a more feasible project. As a result, Game Neverending was discontinued.
In its earliest forms, Flickr was more like a chat room. Called FlickrLive, it allowed users to exchange photos in real-time. The service then evolved and focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users. Eventually, the chat room feature was buried and later dumped.
As it continues to evolve, Flickr ditched Game Neverending's codebase to use its own backend instead.
