Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo Inc on Wednesday confirmed that it has acquired Xoopit, a San Francisco start-up that provides technology to organize photos, videos, and other files that pile up in web-based Yahoo’s e-mail system.
With the acquisition of San Francisco-based Xoopit, the social e-mail startup, Yahoo plans to add new photo sharing features to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo senior vice president Bryan Lamkin said on a company blog posting:
Lamkin said that by integrating Xoopit’s technology with Yahoo Mail, users would be able to centrally organize all the photos they had ever sent or received and then easily share them with others.
“While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it is not for everyone or every occasion,” Lamkin writes. “For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family.”
Xoopit’s technology supports in organizing, sending and sharing of photos through e-mail and allows users to neatly arrange their inboxes as photo indexes, Lamkin wrote on its official blog.
Xoopit has now already connected with Yahoo! to unfold its tools with the latest version of its Yahoo! Mail service. But its original product was a Firefox add-on for Google’s Gmail.
Yahoo! says it will continue to support the Gmail version — at least for now. “For you Gmail+Xoopit users out there who have been waiting for an excuse to switch to Yahoo!, here is your chance,” the blog post reads. “But, in the meantime, we will still be providing support for your Xoopit Firefox Add-on.”
Xoopit lets you pluck multimedia from your webmail account, before sharing them with friends, colleagues, and world+dog. “Xoopit will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail,” the post continues.
It is part of the Sunnyvale Web portal’s attempt to soup up its e-mail service, which it described in a blog post as one of the biggest photo repositories online.
New Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said during the company’s earnings call earlier this week that the company was “doubling down” on Yahoo Mail and would add social features to the product.
The distinction between e-mail and social is becoming increasingly less clear-cut, with Microsoft introducing social networking-like features to its Windows Live services, including Hotmail, last year, and MySpace set to roll out its own e-mail service Thursday. And, of course, most social networks already give users an easy way to send messages to each other in addition to sharing other content.
Lamkin, said in the technology — already the most popular third-party app in Yahoo Mail — helps make sending and sharing photos easy.
“You will be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before — combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view,” he said. “And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well. Just imagine having a tool that collects all the photos you have sent and received over the years into that scrapbook you have never had time to assemble.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But The Wall Street Journal put the price tag at about $20 million. Despite another anemic financial quarter, Yahoo! has finally decided it’s time to spend.