According to TechCrunch, Yahoo will announce today that they’re shutting down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr.

 What it means: this makes complete sense.  The Flickr brand is much stronger and has much more soul than the Yahoo Photos brand.  I’m going out on a limb but I’d like to suggest social media and applications are able to build stronger brands because of higher user involvement.  I think large organizations are starting to realize that they can have a portfolio of unrelated brands online and it still makes sense from a business point of view.  I expect Google will eventually phase out Google Videos in favor of YouTube who has a much stronger brand in the video vertical.  Another noteworthy point: after acquiring Flickr, Yahoo moved the whole team to San Francisco (from Vancouver, Canada) but they’ve maintained a separate office for them in order to keep the entrepreneurial spirit (and possibly retain key employees).