Internet giant Yahoo might be struggling to find its legs after a calamitous head-on collision with a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft, a near shareholder revolt, a new CEO, and belt-tightening, but that isn’t stopping the company for shopping around for new acquisitions. The company has just announced a deal to acquire the privately-held photo organizational service Xoopit. Xoopit and Yahoo already have a history: Xoopit worked with Yahoo to launch Yahoo’s “My Photos” application for Yahoo Mail—currently the most popular third party application in Yahoo Mail—and the company won Yahoo’s Open Hack Day last year.
Yahoo didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition, but the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog cites sources claiming the deal is in the $20 million range.
Yahoo plans to leverage Xoopit’s platform and savvy to enhance its photo sharing capabilities within Yahoo Mail, as well as to offer tools that create virtual shoeboxes of images that are automatically organized for the user. Yahoo claims Yahoo Mail is already one of the largest online photo repositories on the planet, since so many people share photos via email. Yahoo says it does plan to continue providing support for Xoopit’s Firefox add-on and Web application for Gmail, although they will not be taking new signups for the Gmail service.
