London - The round of 1,500 layoffs at Yahoo this week included a number of high-profile members of the team at photo-sharing site Flickr, including George Oates, designer of the site's clean user interface, the Guardian reported. Two other unnamed members of the team were also cut, according to the Guardian's source. The site also reportedly was told that Flickr is among the assets that Yahoo was prepared to sell to Microsoft.

In the Web 2.0 era, simplicity is king. No matter if you're talking about user interface, ease of use or the idea for a blog. To take the latter as an example; there are a number of great blogs out there using other people's images in creative and somewhat controversial ways. The concept is as simple as it is genious: 1. Find a topic that people can releate to. 2. Search for user generated pictures that relate to that topic on a photo-sharing service such as Flickr (the best one) or a social network. 3. Post the picture to your blog with witty commentary. 4. Watch traffic grow and comments flowing in. Three hilarious blogs built using this recipe for success that I recommend to check out is Sorry I Missed Your Party, Hot Chicks With Douche Bags and Demonbaby's MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards. Do you have any other good examples, perhaps using videos instead of photos, post a comment and share the fun!

Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more robust than their equivalent Facebook features, there’s nothing to stop Facebook from copying them in their entirety.

Sunnyvale, Calif. - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing site on Wednesday launched an anticipated video-sharing feature for its 42 million monthly users.

San Francisco - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing service intends to branch out into video with the beta launch of a new Flickr video service next month, CNET News.com reported. The company told CNET that Flickr Video will not replace Yahoo Video, and that the service is not meant to compete with YouTube. Flickr director of product management Kakul Srivastava told CNET the service has to appeal in an "authentic" way to the Flickr community.

Vancouver, Canada - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing site is now host to over two billion photos, as a user from Australia posted the two-billionth image to the site yesterday. The Vancouver-based was founded in February 2004, and acquired by Yahoo in March 2005.

San Francisco - Creative Commons, the nonprofit that advocates for less-restrictive copyright license terms, has found itself the target of a lawsuit, after a photo of a 16-year-old posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license found its way into a Virgin Mobile ad campaign.

Several years ago I wrote a two hundred page thesis for a Masters program all about user interfaces.  The premise was that simplicity and usability were guiding principles to making any online site successful (seems obvious, I know, but it didn't use to be).  Since the late nineties, the importance of usability had slowly been getting more and more important. 

In June, Yahoo! Photos began to close, and users are being encouraged to join Flickr. Later in the month, Yahoo! began including Flickr images in Yahoo! Image Search. These efforts have resulted in an increase in Flickr's US market share of 38% in the past four weeks (week ending 7/7/07 vs. week ending 6/9/07). Flickr is now the #2 photography website in the US, with 6.42% of category visits for the week ending 7/7/07.