Yahoo May Have Already Bought Flickr

Adding some gravitas to the rumors flying around the world that Yahoo intends to purchase Flickr, Om Malik is reporting that the deal may have already been sealed and that Yahoo is waiting to announce on March 1st. Michael Copeland reported the following in Business 2.0 back in January:

Google and Yahoo want to buy it outright, while venture capital firms are flooding it with all kinds of creative proposals. "We get four or five calls a week from VCs," says Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr with his wife, Caterina Fake. "We even had a health-care fund call recently. I guess they wanted in on the excitement."

SFist lurves us some Flickr, but man, it's been in beta since, well, ever. We hope the resources Yahoo has at their disposal -- including the printing available on their own photo service -- will quicken the pace of development. On the other hand, we doubt the Flickr API will continue to be publicly available for long.