Adobe’s Flash technology is under the hood of video announcements Wednesday from Adobe and Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service.

Flickr, a groundbreaking Web 2.0 site when it launched but relatively quiet since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, launched Flickr Video, which allows “pro” users to upload 90-second video clips. Pro accounts start at $25 a year and offer unlimited uploads, although no individual video can exceed 150 megabytes.

While the 90-second limit seems surprisingly tight, particularly compared to YouTube’s 10-minute limit, Flickr spokesperson Heather Champ said the limit was designed for Flickr’s community of avid photographers.

‘Long Photos’

“While that might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought lengthy and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse,” Champ wrote on a corporate blog. “Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different, and so what quickly bubbled up was the notion of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of

Beta tester Paul Stamatiou blogged that the 90-second limit was the subject of much debate among Flickr and its beta testers. Flickr originally wanted to impose a 60-second limit, while users wanted three minutes. The 90-second limit was a compromise that both sides seem subject matter with.

It plus appears that Flickr — or Yahoo — wanted a tight limit to discourage illegal uploading of copyrighted material — a problem that has plagued Google’s YouTube. Flickr wanted to “ensure that only user-created, non-copyrighted composition gets uploaded,” Stamatiou wrote.

The move shows an “admirable restraint” on Yahoo’s part, said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Research, in a telephone interview. “It would have been very tempting to try to exploit Flickr’s user base to compete with YouTube, but Flickr is really a gem for them and it’s to their credit” Yahoo didn’t go down that road, he…

Orginal post by Top Tech News