Amid the hoopla going on over at Flickr protesting a potential takeover by Microsoft (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), I had been wondering what happens now to Flickr Video, the ever-rumored to be just-around-the-corner video service (and my #5 prediction for 2008). Dan Faber at ZDNet has an update today, and it’s more of the same: it’s coming in the next few months.

Stewart Butterfield (Flickr co-founder) told TechCrunch last May that Flickr Video would be coming “soon”. This was reaffirmed by Bloomberg in August. It’s now February 2008, and we still have no video, and the prospect of a major takeover of Yahoo doesn’t seem to bode well for helping it get out the door any quicker – if it does at all now.

While Faber suggests Flickr Video would take over Yahoo Video similar to how Flickr took over Yahoo Photos, I’m not sure that would be the right approach (and Yahoo says they are still deciding how to utilize their video services). I don’t want to see another YouTube competitor and as I wrote back in May, Yahoo trying to go directly after YouTube would likely be a mistake. They need to go smaller, they should make Flickr Video very much akin to Flickr itself, a place for clips that get overshadowed on YouTube – personal videos and things like scenery clips.

I hope Flickr can finally get this service out the door before the big shakeup occurs, because then who knows if we’ll ever see it. As Fake Steve Ballmer notes in a comment on Faber’s post, “WMV only!”.