Count me among those who was absolutely terrified that Microsoft was going to buy out Yahoo!  Also count me as one of the ones who is breathing a sigh of relief at the news that Yahoo rejected the offer, for now.  Actually, I was a little nervous when Yahoo bought Flickr, and also del.icio.us, but as it tuns out, those fears were unfounded.  Flickr has changed very minimally, and del.icio.us hasn't changed at all.  In fact, both services have have changed so little as far as integration with Yahoo (Flickr only changed their login) that I really have to wonder why Yahoo bothered at all.  My only explanation is that Yahoo did it to prevent Google from buying either service.  Google had bought Picasa, which I found to be a very strange purchase, since at the time, Picasa didn't have a web presence.  Google also didn't have a bookmarking service.  Google ended up having to build Picasa's web album infrastructure, and they built their own bookmarking infrastructure.  Neither of which have taken off like Flickr and del.icio.us.  Windows Live services have tanked as well.

But where Yahoo was smart and left those services alone to excel as they had prior the purchase, I have absolutely no faith in Microsoft to do the same.  Flickr will first get wrapped up in Windows Live ID, and then have their content pulled in with Windows Live as fast as humanly possible.  They will also replace the very capable Flash engine with Silverlight.  Just wait and see.  I have no idea what would happen to del.icio.us.  They'd probably port all your bookmarks to Windows Live and then close up that shop.

Anyone disagree?

For anyone trying to get a hold of me, it seems as if my two domain email addresses are not forwarding properly at the moment.  So if you've been emailing me at nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net or nick-at-thecodingmonkey-dot-net and I haven't responded, please try me at schweitn-at-gmail-dot-com.  I have a support ticket into my hosting service, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

Update:  Everything got resolved some time last night, and I even got an influx of emails from throughout the day.  Nice to not lose anything, even if they were delayed several hours.  I actually do prefer nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net however, since at some point, I may stop using gmail, and if everyone sends to that address, I don't have to worry about losing too much email in the switch.

Yes... someone actually asked me to do that at work today.