Today Photobucket launches its newest service which is the mobile Web for the users. According to Photobucket, this new service allow users to do a broad list of things related to photos such as view photos in the album on Photobucket, upload photos and videos from the camera phone, share photos with friends via email, search Photobucket’s vast library for photos and graphics, view tagged photos and find related images as well as browse the daily dose of fun images that found on Photobucket’s home page. Though mobile Web became a recent trend and it is inevitably a new part of a Web 2.0 expansion strategy, not that many of the mobile users or subscribers prefer to use mobile Web than traditional Web. In order to encourage more users in using their mobile Web service, Photobucket has provided this service to all the mobile subscribers with almost all Web-capable cellular devices can use it, notwithstanding the normal carrier rate is remain.

Of course, the mobile Web and traditional Web will grow closer, Photobucket plans to improve this service that include viewing, sharing and searching for video, embedding content on social networking sites from mobile devices and accessing linked tags on third party sites.

Photobucket today is announcing its first integration with MySpace since it has been acquired by the latter in May this year. If you look at both sides and how MySpace planned to integrate Photobucket as one of the third-party application provider to their social network, it took both of these two companies more than six months to do it. This has been a challenge since the images stored by Photobucket users have inevitably been stored in Photobucket’s databases, and now with this newly offered support, MySpace users can add images from Photobucket to a comment column on MySpace profile without having to leave MySpace or log-in to Photobucket. Moreover, a MySpace user can add the images originally uploaded from other users on Photobucket, as Photobucket said, there are billions of images available on its databases at this particular moment.

For recent years, Web 2.0 firms have realized integration with other party only offered greater value. I am looking forward to see that any further integration between these two companies in near future.

Photobucket has released the newer version of Facebook application, now that Facebook members can have the options to access subalbums, quick pictures and send postcards, etc. There is more information can be found on their official blog entry.

Yahoo! Photo begins to closing down its service, as announces in this help page. Moreover, it allowed the existing users few alternative choices besides Flickr, owned by Yahoo!. Users can migrate their photos to Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket. Users are advised to go to http://closing.photos.yahoo.com to make their decisions before September 20, 2007. Meanwhile, the leading photo and video hosting site, Photobucket has announced the welcome of Yahoo! Photos users, capitalize this situation and strike while the iron is hot. Furthermore, Their forums is also discussing the technique of migration the Yahoo! Photos.

While MySpace, owned by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corporation has acquired Photobucket and have been talked loudly across the blogosphere, included one of my posts, there was also a piece of good news that Photobucket has announced the confirmation of it.

Here’s what Photobucket has said about the deal (some excerpts):

Dear Photobucket Friends:

As you may have already heard, today Photobucket announced that it has accepted an offer to be acquired by Fox Interactive Media (FIM), a division of News Corporation. This is a really big piece of news for us at Photobucket.

First and foremost, we expect nothing to change in our day-to-day operations. After the transaction is closed and finalized, the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM. Click here to read more.

At first, MySpace was rumored to be planning the acquisition of Photobucket, first came courtesy of Valleywag, later confirmed by the A-list blogger, Techcrunch and several tech news provider such as webpronews. It seems that both companies realized by joining force together, they can yield a better revenue and financial results on the web. The acquisition took most people by surprise when weeks before this, both companies were loggerheads over an advertising dispute but was later resolved by them. Not sure whether this led them to a preliminary agreement to an acquisition as mentioned in the above.

This above acquisition has a significant impact to Photobucket, not solely on the financial terms and agreement, this is a recognition for the widget, a successful product developed by Photobucket. As you know, MySpace give the users an unique address, the personalized social-network page, and Photobucket may just offered a widget, a favorite MySpace widget for the MySpace users to present their photos or videos. But the acquisition will mean that the address, i.e. social-network page of the user is equally important to the widget.

Photobucket has just announced that it released a new tool that will allow its users to edit the web-based videos. This is a tool that powered by Adobe Systems, a lightweight version that compared to Adobe Premiere. One of the advantage for using this web-based video editing is the users do not need to download it on their PCs. They can instantly use it, and do some editing on their personal media, only if they have installed Adobe Flash Player on their PCs. According to the above mentioned press release, Photobucket users can combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music, and other effects by dragging and dropping content to a sceneline. Clips and content can be reordered, trimmed, and split directly in the sceneline in a web-based environment. Additionally, users can work with content from their own albums, or access over 2.5 billion publicly-shared images and videos on Photobucket. Once editing is complete, the resulting video mashup can be embedded into any web page, blog, or social network profile by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML code.

In my view, this is not the first company that I heard launching this web-based video editing, some companies have successfully delivered this same type of services for quite some times, including EyeSpot, that required a Macromedia Flash Player to run it, and Jumpcut, that also make use of Adobe Flash Player. All these companies were developed the web-based video product with new features in order to get a bigger chunk in the video blogging industry.

Furthermore, I quite impressed on the product strategy deployed by Photobucket. It is currently the third largest video hosting site after YouTube and MySpace, they have overcome some of the problems in startup phases and successfully moved from the concept to reality in just few years. Though the video sharing phenomenon is so popular today, most of the users are not just uploading their videos “for fun”, there is an indication that most people are looking ways to watch the original contents on the video sites. In this case, the development of these tools that edit videos sowed the seeds for the video creators that would only upload original contents in the future.