It is all over the news today; Yahoo! bought Tumblr. An interesting acquisition. This article from Instapaper founder and former first Tumblr-employee shows the dedication of founder David Karp for the product and provides us with trust in the remaining of the Tumblr character within Yahoo!
This is not a strange thought, because it fits a strategy for Yahoo! to build something beautiful out of Flickr and Tumblr. It is no coincidence that Flickr is redesigned in the way it is now, and offering a huge amount of storage with it. Flickr needed a new path to compete with the social photo sharing that has become that dominant with Instagram. Building Flickr as a backbone for Tumblr and making Tumblr the social realtime channel for Flickr is very smart. Tumblr has a big footprint in the creative world, Flickr is transforming its presence towards a much more portfolio look like 500px.
What will be next? Flickr stretching with full video is a logical step. With the offer of huge storage is something that could not be limited for photos, makes no sense. Maybe an acquisition of Vimeo would be the most logical next step fitting the strategy, or else: building Flickr into the first platform that combines video and photos nicely. With Tumblr as the publication engine.