You gotta love job postings. Depending on the description provided, you can often times determine some underlying plans for a company. And the only companies we care about in this regard would be the ones big enough to lend some interesting job postings and descriptions. In this case, WebProNews was tipped off to a posting from Microsoft, and it looks like the giant is hoping to create a viable Flickr competitor. According to the job posting:

"Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing. This role involves leading the team to design the strategy then build and implement a winning solution that will be loved by millions of customers. This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with flickr, smugmug and other photo web solutions today. This is a “v1” opportunity."

So of course we're all wondering: what's it really mean? After the first giant wave of web 2.0 we saw the rise of web-based media sharing tools like Flickr, Blogger and Writely, and we saw them get snatched up by Yahoo and Google. With Yahoo and AOL striving to remain portals, and Google looking to beat Microsoft by busting down the back door, trying its hand at Microsoft's tactics for web-based applications, it almost seemed like these companies had established just about all we needed to see from them. I'm wondering if it's too late for Microsoft to really get into this game?

It's got a lot of projects going on, most of which I imagine would be an integral part of a Flickr competitor's reach. From Live Spaces to its increasing mobile efforts, perhaps Microsoft was waiting for enough of these stars to align before rolling out a cool new photo-sharing tool. It would have to have immediate mobile integration in order to be a worthwhile alternative, and in order to catch the amount of steam that Flickr has garnered, it would also need some cultural importance, and for Microsoft, that means a pretty hefty reliance on the Live Spaces initiative. Perhaps we'll also see some social browsing with its incorporation into Hotmail and Messenger? Either way, we've got our eyes wide open to see what Microsoft comes up with.