I am at the annual Outcast CEO Dinner event – Brad Garlinghouse (Yahoo SVP Communications & Communities) and Stewart Butterfield (Cofounder Flickr) are sitting at my table and told me that they will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow. The actual closure will occur over the next few months, they say.

The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings. Garlinghouse has been one of the stronger proponents of this strategy.

Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr – instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”

Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.

The first graph below shows only U.S. traffic for Flickr and Yahoo. The table below that shows March Comscore numbers for the worldwide audience.

Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.

PR Newswire has announced a partnership with Umbria, a market intelligence company that specializes in blog research and consumer generated media for a new product by the name of “MediaSense Blog Measurement”, that allows clients to assess the impact of online conversations about their company, products and brands.

The new service builds on PR Newswires existing relationship with Technorati, and provides a graphical assessment of the conversational tone and participant demographics.

“Bloggers are thought leaders and opinion-shapers, so tracking who and how quickly they pick up on various news items has become critical for brand and PR professionals,” Howard Kaushansky, president of Umbria said in their media release. “If it’s positive, you want to know. If it’s a mushroom cloud of negativity, you definitely need to know. This partnership gives that knowledge to PR Newswire clients”.

Whilst the continued growth in companies tracking consumer generated media is a positive indication of the continued maturity and acceptance of one of the most important drivers of Web 2.0, the question must be asked: why?

Why do PR Professionals need a service to find out what bloggers are saying about their clients by a third party?

Media monitoring services still play an important role in supporting PR, but this old school model comes from a day before the Internet where national media monitoring via a third party was essential, simply because there wasn’t an alternative, and in many cases, for print, radio and TV there isn’t an all inclusive alternative today. And yet blogs and consumer generated media are the children of a new age, an online age where information is accessible online anywhere in the world at the touch of a button.

Many PR Professionals contact and read TechCrunch so perhaps we can get some answers: is it that some PR Professionals cant type “Insert Clients Name here” into Technorati or Google Blog Search?

How difficult is it to set up feeds from services such as Google News, Yahoo News and Topix which deliver results based on corporate brand names?

Isn’t the whole point of engaging with and participating in a Web 2.0 world one to one communications, removing the middle tier of information dissemination?

Having said that, if you’ve got a full corporate expense account and prefer your information spoon fed, then these sorts of blog tracking services are ideal.

Israel-based internet company, E-learning Knowledge Solutions, recently launched SuTree.com, a video aggregation service where users can add and categorize instructional videos from across the web, providing a directory of video that would often be buried under the weight of competing content on sites such as YouTube and MetaCafe.

The service is similar to Scouta, in that instead of being primarily machine aggregated content, users on both services are encouraged to add the content themselves, tag or categorize it, comment and add to a larger directory to be shared by others, although SuTree does lack at this time any ability to automatically suggest video.

The site has over 5000 videos indexed across a broad field on interests, ranging from Kids through to Pets, Electronics, Food and Business. I was particularly impressed with the variety of source material, its not just the usual collection of YouTube videos that a prevalent on many aggregation sites, but from a much broader field including video from specialist content providers within each area of interest.

It would be easy to bag the site in terms of it Web 2.0 credentials, navigation is very much old school and doesn’t jump out and hit the casual visitor with a flurry of Ajax and DHTML goodness, but for its target audience of beginners, mothers, those with hobbies or seeking to learn something new it provides a nice rounded package that utilizes user generated inputs for the delivery of some great knowledge to many.

The secret startup Guy Kawasaki has been working on will be called Truemors, a source tells us. The site is currently password protected, but Kawasaki has recently posted on his blog saying he’s looking for “people who are in the flow of interesting and true rumors.”

The service will be a “rumor reporting bulletin board with twitter-like capabilities.” Look for a launch later this month.

A screen grab of a cached version of the site (more here):

Contactify is a new service to create a simple “Contact Me” form that let’s people send you emails without knowing your email address. Create an account in a few steps and get a URL back that points to the contact form, which contains a captcha to reduce spam. It works well, but it would be nice if they widgetized this to allow people to add it to their MySpace page or blog without sending people off to the Contactify website. There also appears to be no way to turn the form off, so once people know the URL it’s almost as good as having your email address.

The privacy policy for contactify is also too generic. They need to make a statement that emails collected will not be used for any purpose, period.

A new study from Motorola has found that an amazing 45% of European broadband users now watch at least some television online.

The survey covering the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain found that the French lead Europe in terms of online television consumption with 59% of people choosing to watch previews and episodes of their favorite shows via the web with the Germans trailing at 33%.

The survey did not ask where the respondents obtained the content, ignoring the reality that many were possibly downloading television shows from BitTorrent or similar services.

The results further strengthen the business models of startups such as Joost, that seek to target a massive potential audience through the use of streamed content over a P2P network, but with the safeguards of DRM and imposed advertising delivery built in.

The survey also found that 45% of Europeans expect to be making video calls via their home TV’s by 2012.

“Viewers across Europe are no longer satisfied with fitting into schedules dictated by broadcasters and are turning to the choice and flexibility offered by TV over the internet,” Motorola’s Karl Elliott told the BBC.

“We are witnessing a nation of citizen schedulers who are in control of their entertainment, allowing them to watch what they want, how and when they want it.”

The convergance of Television and the Internet, despite recent false starts with products such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Center, looks set to continue.

Redwood City based Frengo, a mobile social networking startup targeting the growing SMS/ TXT market, have completed Series A funding of $5.7 million. The founding round was led by Trilogy Equity Partners, a firm led by John Stanton, the former T-Mobile USA and Western Wireless Chief Executive, and completed by Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures, both of which provided capital in the initial round of $2.3 million for Frengo in December 2006.

Frengo offers games and services via SMS and MMS. Games typically revolve around Sports or Entertainment and involve competing via phone against friends or other contacts. Frengo’s social networking tools allow user creation of polls, bulletins and quizzes that are sent out and completed via text messaging.

Existing partnerships for the company include a deal with Boost Mobile centered around the NCAA tournament with live wagering of points on games.

CEO Mahi de Silva, formerly with Verisign, has said that the aim of Frengo was to broaden the scope of mobile phone usage to include ‘one-to-many’ interactions; “supporting everyone’s basic desire to relate to other people in a social environment” and that the service was aimed at a core 16-28 year old demographic.

Frengo also operates in the often volitile MySpace service sector, having launched a TXT to MySpace service in February this year.

The company competes in an increasingly competitive marketplace, with SMS centered services such as Twitter rapidly gaining acceptance across the broader field of consumers, although as an idea Frengo is trying to take the existing social networking concepts of Twitter to another level of interactivity. The only question is whether the market is ready for it.