July 23, 2009

Yahoo! has confirmed it will acquire Xoopit, a San Francisco-based startup that offers tools for mining and redistributing photos, videos, and other files that pile up in web-based email clients.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the web giant was in "final stage negotiations" with the startup, and though the company initially declined to comment on the story, it has now announced the acquisition via a blog post.

Xoopit has already partnered with Yahoo! to fold its tools with the latest version of its Yahoo! Mail service. But its original product was a Firefox add-on for Google's Gmail.

Yahoo! says it will continue to support the Gmail version - at least for now. "For you Gmail+Xoopit users out there who’ve been waiting for an excuse to switch to Yahoo!, here’s your chance," the blog post reads. "But, in the meantime, we will still be providing support for your Xoopit Firefox Add-on."

Xoopit lets you pluck multimedia from your webmail account, before sharing them with friends, colleagues, and world+dog. "Xoopit will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail," the post continues.

"Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives."