Shortly after announcing Q1 earnings yesterday, new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson dropped a bomb during the analysts’ call when he said the company will be “shutting down or transitioning roughly 50 properties that don’t contribute meaningfully to engagement or revenue.”

He went on to say that Yahoo’s focus will be on its “core media connections and commerce businesses,” such as Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail and a few other successful Yahoo properties.

But what about the 50 properties that are destined to be shut down or transitioned soon? Let’s take a look at what might and might not be on Thompson’s list.

Flickr?

Would Yahoo shut down one of its most beloved properties? As a user since 2004, I shudder at the thought. Flickr is still one of the most popular photo-sharing sites on the web — it had almost three million photo uploads per day in March, according to Yahoo’s own figures.

So that would appear to meet Thompson’s standard for saving properties with strong engagement. But does Flickr make any money for Yahoo? It sells inexpensive “pro” memberships and shows ads to non-Pro account holders, but the income from those is probably minimal. Yahoo reportedly fired at least some, and possibly all of Flickr’s customer service team earlier this year. But the product is still being developed — witness yesterday’s Android app upgrade as evidence.

My guess is that Flickr stays alive, at least temporarily. But that may be more of a hope than anything. It may be a stronger sale candidate than most other Yahoo properties mentioned below, especially since Instagram was worth a billion dollars to Facebook.

Yahoo Answers

Like Flickr, Yahoo Answers is an extremely popular site that gets high marks for engagement but probably doesn’t make much money for Yahoo.

It’s an active product, at least judging by today’s announcement of changes to its level system (changes that its most active users won’t like, ironically).

My gut feeling is that Yahoo Answers, despite the high engagement, is a more likely shut down candidate than Flickr. But it’s not as likely to be chopped as the next eight Yahoo products I’ll list.

8 Yahoo Products That Could Be Shut-Down Candidates

1.) Yahoo Upcoming

Once a popular event guide, Upcoming seems to be a ghost town these days. The most recent post on the Upcoming News Blog was back on December 15, 2010. It announced a beta version of Upcoming’s new site design. You can still see the beta design at beta.upcoming.yahoo.com, but the main site hasn’t been touched. Knock, knock … is anyone home?

2.) Yahoo Directory

Once a must-use site for link builders, the Yahoo Directory is largely an afterthought now — including for Yahoo. Some years ago, the company stopped posting a list of daily directory additions.

In 2010, Yahoo shut down directories in France, Germany, Italy and Spain; the UK and Ireland directory followed soon after.

At the time, Yahoo said the U.S. directory was safe. That’s probably not the case now.

3.) Yahoo Pipes

Pipes seems to be a fairly popular site in some circles, and offers some interesting tools for collecting and curating web content. But it may not meet Thompson’s credo of focusing on high engagement and high revenue services, and it’s not at all consumer-facing.

4.) Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups is almost in the same place that Flickr and Yahoo Answers is. It has a huge userbase, but it’s probably not making the company enough money to justify keeping it alive. Yahoo Groups hasn’t seen any significant development in years — at least nothing’s that plainly visible to its users.

5.) Yahoo Clues

This is a pretty cool service that reveals search trends and also serves as something of a keyword research tool. But with Yahoo already having shut down Yahoo Site Explorer, we have to wonder how committed the company is to products like this that are perhaps geared more toward online marketers than Yahoo’s general consumer audience.

6.) Yahoo Fire Eagle

Yahoo’s location sharing service never seemed to catch on, at least to me. It stores your location so that other sites and services can use it. But the app gallery isn’t exactly a who’s who of social/local/mobile networking.

7.) Yahoo Babel Fish

Google Translate seems to own this niche, and Babel Fish probably doesn’t have enough user engagement to justify its existence at this point. (It also looks like Yahoo hasn’t touched its design in years, for whatever that’s worth.)

8.) Yahoo Koprol

Koprol is an Indonesian site that’s similar to Foursquare. Yahoo acquired it in 2010, and there were recent reports that its entire developer team was fired. So long, Koprol.

There are literally dozens of other Yahoo products and services that could be on the chopping block — like Smush.it and Yahoo Avatars, for example. Many are services you’ve never used and perhaps haven’t even heard of.

But what Yahoo products do you think should be on the chopping block? Or what products do you hope survive Yahoo’s upcoming cuts? Comments are open.

We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool’s Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google’s international properties. Below is a recap of Google’s (and a few others) pranks, and we’ll do our best to update this as the day goes along.

Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR

The main joke at the moment is Google’s “announcement” of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, which brings Google’s self-driving cars to NASCAR race tracks “by the middle of next season.”

There’s also a faux news video about Google Racing (with no embed code – the cruelest joke of all!) starring Jeff Gordon and a couple other NASCAR drivers, not to mention Sergey Brin pretending to be Google’s first NASCAR driver … or whatever you call the person who doesn’t actually drive the car.

And if you go to Google.com, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button has been renamed “I’m Steering Lucky” and there’s a link to the Google Racing microsite.

Google Maps In 8-Bit For NES

Google’s pranks began early this morning with a blog post announcing that Google Japan has created an 8-bit version of Google Maps for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

You can relive all your favorite 1980s graphics by clicking the “Quest” button in the upper right corner on maps.google.com.

Google Street Roo

In Australia, where Google Street View cars and trikes can’t get to remote areas of the continent, Google says it’ll use kangaroos with mini-cameras mounted on their noggins to photograph the Australian outback. They’re calling it Google Street Roo. Hopefully the 1,000-plus kangaroos won’t mistakenly collect any personal data via wifi while they’re hopping across Australia.

Google China: Underwater Search

I said it was worldwide, right? Well, even Google China has gotten in the act with an underwater search gag. It’s more like a Google doodle than a prank, though.

Google’s Really Advanced Search

Speaking of search, this one will probably go over well with our audience. Google’s really advanced search page has some pretty funny options, like this:

You can also narrow your results based on what font the page uses, what textured background the page has and which “embarrassing grammatical faux pas” is found on the page. If you’re into SEO, you’ll like this one. You may even find yourself wishing that the page actually worked.

Google Search: Weather Control

Another search gag: Google Weather Control. Type in any weather-related search (like “seattle weather”) and you can make the weather anything you want it to be. You can turn Seattle into Phoenix, if you’d like.

Google AdWords: Click-to-Teleport

The AdWords team has a new extension called Click-to-Teleport that lets “potential customers to instantly teleport to your business location directly from a search ad.”

The YouTube Collection

YouTube’s annual April Fool’s Day prank is the YouTube Collection — all of YouTube on DVD. Once you order, 175 trucks will deliver the DVDs right to your door. Oh, just watch the video. Make your checks payable to “Matt McGee” if you’re planning to order.

Play Music In Google Analytics

I’m not seeing this (yet?) in my Google Analytics account, but this Aussie blog says there’s a little music icon on the Visitors Overview page in Google Analytics. You can play a piano or sitar while enjoying (or bemoaning) your website’s performance.

Google Chrome Multitask Mode

The Google Chrome team thinks one mouse/hand isn’t enough for web browsing, so they’ve launched Multitask Mode — two mice/hands at once.

Gmail Tap

Gmail Tap converts your keyboard from 26 letters to just two — dots and dashes, just like Morse code.

Google Fiber Bar

Forget that fiber optic network thing. Google Fiber is actually just a fiber-filled candy bar that helps you be up to 100 times more productive than ever before.

That’s Not All…

There are other search-related April Fool’s Day gags, perhaps my favorite of which is Google Nigeria, which jokingly asks you to input your bank account number so you can “search for inheritance.”

Don’t be alarmed: the search box just runs a normal Google search (not that you’d actually put your bank account number in there, anyway, right?) and, while this is NOT an official Google gag, it also doesn’t appear to be run by some Nigerian prince. (It’s a production from 85by55.com.)

There’s also TheGoogleButton.com, which lets you make a fake Google search result page with whatever website (and title/snippet) you want in the No. 1 spot.

Flickr has announced that all photos can now be seen in the 1980s style “Atkinson dither,” accessible via a small button in the lower right part of any photo page.

And last, and probably not least, the folks at Reddit announced “reddit timeline,” which brings a touch of Facebook to the proceedings and is pretty funny — especially when you click on “1970s” and get the animated rainbow header, along with “news” about Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the war in Vietnam.

And now that April Fool’s Day has actually begun … time to sign-off, at least until the next prank comes along.

Postscript:

As expected, we have a few more pranks to add and they all come from Google. Here you go!

GoRo: Google Mobile

Google Mobile has introduced a program called GoRo — the name is a play on the actual “Go Mo” campaign — that encouraged business owners to learn how to optimize their websites for rotary phones. Why? Because “technology is cyclical.”

Google Analytics: Interplanetary Reporting

Google Analytics jokingly wrote about a sneak preview of “interplanetary reports” that let website owners “understand visitor activities from neighboring stars and planets.”

Interplanetary reports will be rolled out in 2030, Google says, “when we anticipate local space travel becomes widespread.” Heh. Watch them be right about that part.

Google AdWords: Planetary Targeting

The AdWords folks didn’t stop just with Click-to-Teleport (see above). Oh no, there’s more. If you login to your AdWords account and edit location settings on one of your campaigns, you’ll see a joke about being able to do planetary targeting.

And yes, if you follow through and type “Mars,” for examplem, it shows up as one of the targeting options. There’s even a fake support page explaining how it all “works.”

At least I think it’s fake. Who can tell anymore?

Flickr has had an iPhone app for more than two years.

The new Android app appears to offer several features not available on the iPhone version — including filters to help edit photos before publishing, and additional sharing options. The Android app has been described as taking “a few cues from Instagram,” which is also expected to launch its first Android app soon.

Flickr’s Android app is currently available is close to three dozen countries, which are listed on Flickr’s help pages.

Flickr Photo Sessions

Flickr also announced a new feature called Photo Sessions that lets multiple users browse the same photos simultaneously. Think of it, perhaps, as a modern version of sitting around looking at vacation slides together.

Photo sessions can be started from any photostream or photoi set that has sharing options turned on — look for the new “Start a Photo Session” in the Sharing options menu. Up to 10 people can join a photo session, and signed-in users will have access to additional tools including live chat.

Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving just tweeted a ringing endorsement of Flickr, the company’s photo sharing site/community.

Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.

The tweet is no doubt a response to questions earlier this week about Flickr’s profitability and the possibility that Yahoo might shutter it (as other Yahoo properties apparently will be shuttered).

Long-time Flickr user Thomas Hawk took a stab yesterday at estimating how much money Flickr brings in for Yahoo, and after using what I’d call some questionable numbers, came up with about $50 million per year — small change for a company of Yahoo’s size, especially considering the costs of running a website with more than 5 billion photos. ReadWriteWeb followed Hawk’s article with one of its own that asked if Flickr might someday land on Yahoo’s chopping block.

Cal Henderson, former Director of Engineering at Flickr, responded in the comments on ReadWriteWeb that Hawk’s calculations “are deeply flawed,” and pointed out that Flickr gets a substantial portion of its revenue not from selling Pro accounts, but from ads and other partnerships.

Between Henderson’s refuting of the post that started the discussion, and Irving’s tweet this afternoon, it would seem that Flickr users can breathe easy for the time being.

It’s a search engine that looks for Flickr users you may know across five platforms: Flickr itself, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and Facebook.

The new tool is accessible via a “People you may know” widget on the Flickr home page, or via a link in the “Contacts” dropdown menu. Recommendations are based on your contacts and the Flickr users they know.

In many ways, it’s reminiscent of Twitter’s ongoing efforts to foster more connections between users. (Facebook has similar friending tools, too, of course.)

If you don’t want to be found in this new search tool, Flickr says it will obey the “hide your profile from public searches” setting.

The changes include:

• Photos are 28% larger now
• Navigating from photos and to photos is faster now
• A new lightbox feature to enlarge photos
• Preview up five photos at a time
• Changed location of photo’s title, description, when a photo was taken, it’s location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image.
• Centralized photo actions, like embed, delete, etc.

I have been using the beta for a few weeks and I do find the overall new design much faster and more useful.

After tomorrow’s deadline, Pro users will only be able to access photo stats dating back 28 days.

Flickr has gone back and forth with its Pro members on this issue. Historical referrer data has come and gone, and in early March, Flickr first announced that the historical data was available again, but warned of the June 1st deadline. A section of the Flickr help pages offers something close to an apology and explanation why the historical data is going away:

We promised you access to your all time data, and we’re disappointed we’ve not been able to deliver on that. We’ve been trying for over a year to get the data ready for you and in the process we have found that it’s just not sustainable for us to offer this access over the long term. What’s available is what we have managed to generate so far, it’s offered as is with no guarantees. We know it’s missing some data but fixing the holes or offering the data for longer would require us to divert too much attention from making the rest of the site better which, as always, is our main goal.

A Yahoo spokesperson clarified the above for us, saying, “creating and maintaining the files are processor and time intensive, requiring too much ongoing support.”

For businesses and individuals that rely on Flickr as part of an overall marketing strategy, this is an inconvenience at minimum. It’s also something of a warning flag that a company of Yahoo’s stature doesn’t have the resources to maintain historical stats for its paid Flickr members.

For example, the picture I took of Danny Sullivan with (former Microsoft’s) Kevin Johnson at a past SMX conference was a nice photo of Danny to tag. I click on the “add person” link on the right side of the page and begin entering in Danny’s name. Since Danny is a contact of mine in Facebook, I can easily add him as a person on this photo.

You then click on the little square on the right side of Danny’s name, which brings up a box on the photo. You then resize the box and place the box around Danny’s face. I believe as soon as I set this, Danny would get a notification that he has been tagged.

Then I tried to add Kevin Johnson, who is not a contact of mine on Flickr, which gave me this option:

If you tag a private photo, that person you tag on that photo will have access to see the picture, no matter what privacy options you have set. For more details, see the links below:

Who can add you to a photo: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/photospeople/

Who can add people to your photos: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/photoprivacy/

To find out how to remove someone from your photos, check out the FAQs: http://www.flickr.com/help/people/

Here is a walk through, screen by screen.

The app icon is plain and simple:

When you load up the app and past the start screen, images are displayed on the front page. But the images has slow motion to them, as they pane in and out between other images. If you are logged in, you get images from your friends as well. Here is a screen cap of that page:

From here, you have several icons and buttons you can click on. The most prominent is the search box at the top. I will explore each of the features below.

Here are the search options, including the ability to search “all uploads,” “from your contacts,” and “your photostream.” There is no auto-complete, plus, even though it does ask for your location, it does not give you the option of seeing photos in your location:

Here are the search results:

The “recent” button takes me to see recent “activity” or “uploads.” Here is a screen shot of my recent activity, showing recent comments left on my photos and recent favorites by others on my photos:

Here is a look at the recent “uploads” from my account:

The “You” button shows me my most recent pictures on Flickr:

Clicking on the top right icon will change the view from thumbnails to list view:

When you click on an image, you can see the image picture in larger format, more details about the photo, plus you can email it, skip forward or backwards or comment on the photo. Plus you can click on the image or click on the image tags:

Here is the comment form:

Here is that same image in the larger image viewer:

Here is a look at the tag search results:

To add a picture, click on the camera icon at the top right and you are given these options:

The “i” button takes you to learn more about the app, privacy policies and also gives you the option to login or log out at the top left of this screen:

The changes include:

• “View” controls to see the image results in small, medium or detailed view or even to see them as a slideshow.
• “i” icon on small and medium views, when clicked you get more detailed information about a particular photo.
• Perspective column on right, can show groups, photographers, tag clusters and places.
• Refinement summary information displayed on the search results.