WebFives, a sharing service from Vizrea, a pioneer in easy online sharing. WebFives takes a full-featured, premier sharing service with photos, videos, audio, blogs, tagging, friends, comments, ratings and more-and adds the highest quality online media sharing available today. However, Michael Toutonghi, CEO of WebFives Corporation is announcing that WebFives will close down at the end of this year after being acquired by 
Microsoft. Here’s an excerpt of the announcement on Webfives:
“In November of 2007, we reached an agreement with Microsoft, wherein Microsoft has acquired all rights to WebFives technology, patents pending, trademarks, and software to incorporate into its products and services over time. In order to make our wind down process as easy as possible for our users, Microsoft has agreed to provide us with a license to continue operating WebFives until the end of the year, giving you time to copy any information you would like to keep to your own PCs or another service prior to the end of the year.
What this means to you is that we will be closing the WebFives service at the end of this year, after giving you this notice and time to download and copy any content that you may be storing on our servers. In order to copy content from our servers, you can click on the item you would like to copy and look for the download links on the left side when viewing the item. Use right-click (on a PC) and select “save as” to save the file on your PC.
When we do turn off the WebFives service after December 31, 2007, any content previously uploaded to WebFives user accounts will be deleted from our servers and no longer available online. While WebFives has pioneered some great technologies, including automatic upload of content from mobile phones and PCs, high-quality video sharing services, and automatic RSS feeds for everyone, our next challenge will be to help Microsoft incorporate the best of those technologies into its already comprehensive suite of products and services. I encourage you to look at MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live services as an alternative to WebFives for serving your video, photo, music sharing, and blogging needs on the Internet.”
So Microsoft is joining the wagon at last, when Google already holds Picasa and Yahoo! holds Flickr firmly all this time. With Microsoft acquiring the WebFives and shutting the service down completely at the end of this year, this would mean Microsoft would probably be relaunching it with a new brand, or integrate it into other parts of Microsoft’s services. Let’s see what will Microsoft come out to grab the photo sharing service which has been largely dominated by Flick and Picasa.
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