Photobucket is everywhere these days, and that will soon include an application that will find the popular photo-sharing site perched onto several active third-party Web presence enablers.
Photobucket Media Plug-in 2.0 will be available later this year, allowing users on partner sites like blogging haven LiveJournal, free personal website provider Freewebs, and the avatar-fueled Gaia Online community to search through Photobucket digital snapshots and videos for embedded content without ever having to leave the third-party site.
That is an attractive distinction in many ways. Way too often, amateur websmiths find themselves linking directly to unauthorized images. The practice, called deep linking, can be frustrating to webmasters who see their bandwidth limits squeezed dry by bloggers who may not be aware of the financial ramifications of their actions. It's a troubling dilemma, especially since the image search functionality of sites like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and IAC/InterActiveCorp's (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com make it all too easy to find links to bandwidth-hogging images.
A site like Photobucket doesn't mind the practice. It actually encourages it. With more than 3 billion images uploaded to its site, Photobucket invites its 44 million users to deep link away.
News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) announced last month that it will acquire Photobucket, in part because so many of its MySpace users were using the service to provide photos, videos, and slideshows to liven up their profile pages.
The new plug-in is important. By encouraging users to stay on third-party sites as they search through the Photobucket library for embeddable content, that should reduce the need to hit up the image search engines like Google, Ask, or Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) Flickr.
Forget about keeping your enemies close. Keeping your friends close -- and away from your enemies -- is the right way to win this battle.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a fan of Photobucket, even if he's not photogenic. He does not own shares in any of the stocks in this story. Rick is also part of the
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