Cheers, photography nerds! Life magazine, your grandma's favorite childhood mag, shuttered in 2007, is returning! Except this time it's not going to be a magazine, it's going to be an Internet destination. And instead of publishing anything, it's going to be a service in direct competition with many other services.

Oh how the digital age changes people.

… Life magazine will again be reincarnated, this time as Life.com. Time has partnered with Getty Images to launch Life.com as a destination for thousands of new and classic photos in early 2009.
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Time is looking to leverage the power of the Web to be timely and deep. Life.com will publish 3,000 new images each day from across the globe while also housing archives of thousands of Life magazine photos from the '30s through the '90s.

Executives said that Life.com will look to leverage the growing prominence of image search on engines like Google to drive traffic to the site.

Life.com also will feature several consumer-friendly offerings of the Web 2.0 variety, including the ability to share photos with friends and create special interest photo collections. Users also will be able to purchase photo albums of user-generated albums on the site.