Remember sometime back we told you about how Yahoo ^[1] had acquired Xoopit ^[2] a hugely popular photo indexing service and raised questions about what would happen to Gmail ^[3] users who use the software?

Turns out that the nightmare has finally come true. In a very controversial decision, Yahoo has announced that they will be disabling the Xoopit service ^[4] for Gmail users.

Xoopit teamed up with Yahoo! in July 2009. We are excited to be making the world’s best email platform a fantastic place to see and share photos, and decided that the best way to make that happen is to focus on our effort on Yahoo! Mail. We’re sad to say goodbye to our users on Gmail but we know that we will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don’t want you to end up with a lousy experience.

I am not sure how many people would be surprised with this decision as the writing was already on the wall when Yahoo bought Xoopit. Your Gmail data will not be deleted, however the data stored on Xoopit servers will be inaccessible starting November 13, 2009. All you data will be permanently removed by February 11, 2009.

I personally never used Xoopit in Gmail, but the Yahoo mail application ^[5] is pretty good. Hopefully, we will see a bright Google engineer come up with a Gmail Labs ^[6] feature that does something similar. It would really be interesting to see if that ever happens in near future.

What is your take on this? Have you been using Xoopit with your Gmail account? Do let us know through your comments.

[via ^[7]]