Slashdot Mirror
Flickr to Grant Commercial API Key to Competitors
eobanb writes "The Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has come under fire recently for the perceived 'lock-in' that their API creates. Flickr's terms of service state clearly that all photos uploaded to Flickr by users are owned by their respective users, yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting. Surprisingly, Flickr developer Stewart Butterfield posted in the thread on Flickr: "I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access." This means that users will soon be able to freely move data between different photo-sharing sites, like Zooomr (which has already implemented the Flickr API), Google PicasaWeb, 23hq, or Tabblo."
Who uses these things anyways. *IM* + send file .... or just e-mail a rar. I can't see the use of this stuff at all. Imageshack if you need to post stuff on a website and done (no signup and it always works...)
For those that know how and are willing to pay for their own hosting, I still think the flexibility of writing one's own scripts, not to mention not having to abide by silly Terms & Conditions is the much better option.
yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting.
Umm...
Right-click. "Save As".
For those images that use "protection", I recommed the wonderful "Nuke Anything" plugin for FireFox... Just right-click the image, "Remove this object" to get rid of the transparent image over it, then you can save it.
And yes, for the "didn't read the FP" Nazis, I realize that the API does not equal the actual webpage - I just consider the distinction irrelevant.
If not, what does this mean to me?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Great!
Here we finally see the big move happening that's the real mark between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0!
No more individual sites, where your data resides, but interchangebility between websites without all the hassles.
I think lots of other services will follow this example because the resulting freedom will definately be missed when has been tasted somewhere. In the next few weeks I expect to see a lot of other companies open up their API's to allow the same kind of data sharing.
Yes, I am very excited!
Next step will be the availabilty of this extended API for every normal user, so they have real freedom. But that will probably take a year or even longer.
That's not exactly an option if you have hundreds of pictures uploaded and want to migrate.
Or just use http://flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html
"You can construct the source URL to a photo once you know its ID, server ID and secret, as returned by many API methods."
WTF? Where do you people get these photos? Aren't there, like, ITAR controlling the distribution of those things?
http://outcampaign.org/
As well as all the usual 'everything should be open arguments' there's a really simple reason why Flickr is right to implement this for their own reasons. It gives them great metrics on where their users are going. If Zoomr uses its api key to request a certain Flickr user's photos, and then that user becomes less active on Flickr, Flickr knows where the user has gone. This way it can see good data on its competitors and take any action necessary by producing features which specifically target one particular competitor.
We're talking about *commercial* APIs guys: a mass transfer of hundreds/thousands of megabytes of data a day to a competitor's site. The personal API keys are fine for doing little cool things on user's desktops, but do not allow such intensive work specifically so someone can poach your customers.
I understand Stewart's reluctance, but I think people on his team have got it right, Flickr has to step up and say "We are the best, and we are going to prove it." Locking customers into your site is the sort of pro-corporate anti-user image that Flickr avoided, and won them such goodwill.
Personally, I think Flickr is still the best. It's clean, it does things well. Zooomr is OK, but it's a complete carbon copy, with some pointless added bits.
Who moded that funny it's disgusting and should be removed!
This is a respected site not some trash community site!!
I think you need to revise that post, this IS Slashdot, after all.
-- Ravensfire
"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion"
Currently I'd say the really defining aspect of "Web 2.0" is be super friendly and offer everything you possibly can, just to get the biggest community and hopefully sell it, or advertise to it.
:)
You may note from my URL that I run a "competing" image hosting site, and have been for years - before these new guys were all around. You'll also notice that we offer the grand total of 1mb of free storage on free accounts (although this will be increasing in the next few months for the first time in years), and yet we have over 23,000 users. But we simply can't compete with Flickr/Google/any Venture Capital backed outfit.
However, we're proudly "Web 1.0" in terms of we're backed by real money and if something is going to cost us more than it will generate to keep the service running, it won't get added. Contrast this with the Web 2.0 method of offering everything under the sun, and you may think I'm nuts. But how long does everyone really think these "unlimited" feature sites are going to be around for? When the Venture Capital finally runs out, it'll be the old Web 1.0 sites that remain. Youtube and flickr etc. are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per week, or even day, just to maintain - and they generate no income. Some of us have been here and seen all this before.
I am sure I'll be modded down on this however, because as a user there has never been a better time to use the web. You can get whatever you want for free, people are fighting to offer you the greatest services that they can all at no cost - and now for you to be able to move elsewhere if you want to. It's also a great time to be a Web 2.0 startup and become a millionaire from venture capital. I just wonder how long all this will last
So you're saying there is a company that specializes in transferring photos from one service to another?
Hyperom.com
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
The point is to make it easy to transfer one's files from Flickr to a competitor (and vice versa).
Well, then you just upload the pictures from your harddrive to the new site. People don't actually keep their only copies on Flickr, do they?
I don't know why it surprises everyone when they use free services and aren't allowed to do something you want. Like when you use a free email service, and all of a sudden they start charging for POP access. Or with free web hosting, they decide to take away features, or just cut you off because your using too much bandwidth, or the company goes bust. If you want web hosting, you'd be better off paying for it. For under $10 a month, you can get 20 GB of space, 1000 GB of transfer, and lots of nice features like blogs, email, photo albums, databases, and your free to access all the stuff you're hosting by FTP, SSH, or whatever else your host provides. If the free stuff isn't good enough, then cough up some money for some good hosting. It isn't expensive, and will save you a lot of grief.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Here's a bookmarklet that gives you the full-size original photo: "Get Flickr Original."
0 o r +
javascript:%20for(%20i%20in%20global_photos%20)%2
{%20p%20=%20global_photos[i];%20}%20window.locati
n%20=%20'http://static.flickr.com/'%20+%20p.serve
%20+%20'/'%20+%20p.id%20+%20'_'%20+%20p.secret%20
%20'_o.jpg';
Remove the linebreaks (inserted to get around Slashcode-enforced spacing) and you're set. Works in Safari, and I'm assuming Firefox and Opera as well.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
This is very interesting. An important part of the "web-mapping war" relates to two important characteristics: (1) how the API are complete and easy to use and what's the licence, and (2) how well Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Ask, etc. successfully integrates many services together. It is not only about satellite imagery resolution, it's also about the API and licenses and services integration.
;-)
About the new commercial use for Yahoo! Maps and API (from slashgeo):
" Yahoo! Maps now allowing commercial use. From Yahoo!: "Until today, the APIs were available only for non-commercial use unless you applied for an exception. The concept of commercial and non-commercial has gone away and exceptions are no longer necessary in most cases. We have given you explicit Usage Policies to help guide you. Whether on your business website, blog or personal site, you no longer have to ask for permission." There's also a new Official Yahoo! Maps blog "
But that's not the end. Starting this week, the new Google Earth licence does not allow you to install Google Earth at work at all, even for personal use. Again from slashgeo:
"The Ogle Earth blog indicates that if you use Google Earth at work (the free version), you're in illegality. From the site: "1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties. "
Oh yeah, and unrelated to the story but still very interesting, you can geocode your Picasa photos using Google Earth. I'll stop there. See my sig to learn more
Animoog.org
Did anyone knew about that PicasaWeb thing? I've been reading their Terms of Service and i found this:
upon receipt of a certificate or other legal document confirming your death, Google will close your account and you will no longer be able to retrieve content contained in that account.
So.. if i dead, i won't be able to retrieve my photos??? WTF???!
We're talking about *commercial* APIs guys: a mass transfer of hundreds/thousands of megabytes of data a day to a competitor's site.
Seeing that the photos are owned by the people who upload them, this kind of mass transfer is completely out of the question. Unless, of course, said competitor has secured the permissions from the thousands of contributors beforehand. In which case it's probably easier to inform the world of a alternative service and hope for the best.
What this does is to allow customers to switch easily between Flickr and/or its competitors. Let's say you have an account with Flickr and want to move to one of its competitors. The competitor would now have access to Flickr's API, so it could write a script which (with your permission, of course) downloads all of your Flickr photos and puts them into galleries in your account with the competitor. This would be easier for most customers than downloading all their files.
Because they require a reciprocal key from the competitor, this would also allow Flickr to build a script to move your images from the competitor to your new Flickr account.
Capiche?
Even better - i host pics, email and blogs for about 25 close friends and family members on a $10usd/mo plan. Everyone gets a bunch of email addresses, space aplenty to share their family pics, and all I ask them is they buy me a beer or two whenever I catch up with them. Total outlay for me? $120 + about 1/2 an hour showing people how to use the admin panel I set up for them. Benefit to me? About 5-8 beers month on average, and I would have been paying for the hosting just to have my website up anyway. Oh, and as an IT guy the site is a tax deduction anyway :-)
This has long been a concern of Flickr users. I was one of them, so I wrote an application that will allow you to download your pictures back from Flickr. I know it doesn't solve the entire concern of moving your library, but it is a start. You can check it out here.
Sure public APIs initially sound like a gift from god, but from a business viewpoint there's a lot more to it than just "granting your lesser competitors access to your data." In an altruistic world it would only be used to suck off a users data when the user definetively makes the switch. But what happens when they go back? You have a competitor with access to their data who now my endlessly refresh the users data and taunt them to come back because "It's easy your data is already here!" Clearly that's a privacy violation and an abuse on the original company's (Flickr in this article) bandwidth. What would be a fool proof system is exporting it all to a user-owned file (say a .zip for photo archives). This file could then be uploaded to any number of services and they would parse it automatically. Unfortunately, photo's aren't exactly low-bandwidth so that would be incredibly inconvenient to the end user.
So, I guess we come to the conclusion that what Flickr is doing is okay, as long as competitors also open up their platforms. That way, if one company scrapes too much, they can do it right back.
It all comes down to business...
I don't see why the term "pro-corporate" needs to be a epithet instead of a positive note. Businesses in any unregulated market such as the web are the prime example of why the free market works best -- flickr is a corporation. Yes, it is a big-bad-daddy-business for those anti-market politicos here (conservative and liberal alike). They're taking a big step here by offering their customers an exit policy without contractual cost, and this is a good step for corporations as a whole.
Why do most corporations NOT allow these exit offerings? Because they're licensed or regulated by the State -- they're given an advantage, and they use their excessive contracts to keep that advantage. Don't think this is a "big business" fault, it is a "big State" fault that the businesses are taking advantage of.
I agree. The pro memberships are a revenue stream along with the print services. The other opportunity here comes from the tagging. Through tagging, Flickr can know what the images are about. This enables contextual advertising beyond what images.google.com could ever hope for.
Because the non-pro memberships on Flickr limit users to 2 sets, users are encouraged to use tags to organize their own photos. So, Flickr has really created an incentive for users to perform data entry that Flickr can use to commercialize this content.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Most people don't have the time or inclination to set up their own hosting with photo sharing software and all the hassle that comes with it. It's much easier to use some thing like flickr.
;)
I host my photos using Apache::Gallery on a linux box at home. There are no hosting charges and bandwith isn't much of an issue since only family and friends view them
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Huh?
I think you skipped a few steps there. How is a company not providing an exit strategy to customers a fault of the government? (You're being graded for the logic and comprehensibility of your answer.)
Have you finally passed the caricature-of-yourself event horizon and become a libertoonian?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
(now I'm getting off-topic to flickr and Yahoo!, but in order to add important information to my parent post, I dare face the mods... ;-)
:-) If you haven't read the links I provided in the parent post, the Ogle Earth bog also tells us: "The EULA for the Free and Plus version of Google Earth 4.0 has had a slight reorganization, with a crucial sentence getting promoted nearer to the top.". This means the smallest amount you must pay is 400$US for Google Earth Pro (unless you're ready for the Enterprise version? ;-).
There's seem to be some confusion. A lot of people I told about the free version of Google Earth not being allowed in a business environment quickly forget the "free" in my sentence
Animoog.org
Well, you shouldnt need the use of the service if you're dead. Of course if you're being frozen, there could be a problem upon being reanimated and discovering that you died, had a certificate sent to Google.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Here's a bookmarklet that gives you the full-size original photo: "Get Flickr Original."
Holy Batman, Batman!
And here I thought myself clever for the suggestion to use "Nuke Anything" to remove the transparent div.
Best javascript trick I've seen this month... Even if it just sticks an "_o" on the end, I didn't realize Flickr kept the original, I thought they downsampled everything to 400x500 (or 500x400) for the sake of space.
Thank you!
All I meant was by "pro-corporte" was desicions being taken that are in the interests of the company, and not the users. These two do not necessarily mix. See: Microsoft.
Umm...
Right-click. "Save As".
Oh, that's easy if you have maybe 10-50 images in Flickr. Try that with... oh, I guess I only have 200 photos in there. I guess this is why people have the paid accounts. Otherwise, Gallery seems to work okay, even if it misses most of the Flickr features.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
There's no set up necessary when you get a hosting plan. Just click on Gallery 2, and it gets installed for you. Nothing to set up. Apache is set up, MySQL is set up, Email servers set up, webmail set up. I trust that the guys running the hosting service know more about properly setting up all this stuff than I do. Also, I save money on the electricity of running that extra box, the cost of having an extra box, and I pay cheaper Internet access rates because I'm not hosting a server. It's also more reliable than your general home internet. They also do back-ups, and a myriad of other services I wouldn't bother to do myself. And I bet if you put a couple Google ads on the 25 friends' accounts you were hosting, you could probably make your money back, and then some.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
There's no set up necessary when you get a hosting plan. Just click on Gallery 2, and it gets installed for you. Nothing to set up. Apache is set up, MySQL is set up, Email servers set up, webmail set up. I trust that the guys running the hosting service know more about properly setting up all this stuff than I do. Also, I save money on the electricity of running that extra box, the cost of having an extra box, and I pay cheaper Internet access rates because I'm not hosting a server. It's also more reliable than your general home internet. They also do back-ups, and a myriad of other services I wouldn't bother to do myself. And I bet if you put a couple Google ads on the 25 friends' accounts you were hosting, you could probably make your money back, and then some.
/. readers in terms of tech savy.
For you an I there's "no setup". However, my father would take weeks to get it done. He's not dumb, he's just not "computer smart". To him, Apache is 1) a Native American Indian b) a type of Chevy truck
You cannot think that the rest of the world is even close to
Example: I was showing a friend how to use Picasa & Gallery. He's 50, very mechanical, expert level skier and motorcycle rider, the best finish carpenter around... not dumb. However, he wasn't aware that the "open/save" dialog box in WIndows was related to all the folders on the desktop - he wasn't sure how to find something after he saved it.
Thta's one of the reasons I'm doing web design and web hosting in a small town - there's lots of small businesses who want a $20 a month website.
Only in some magic universe containing only you is the Internet an unregulated market. There are no unregulated markets in Western countries. There are only limited unregulated markets in the third world. Those aren't, strictly speaking, markets except in the most liberal interpretation of the word "market."
"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer." Jean Jacques Rousseau. A lot of charged language has been flying around over the past four days or so with regards to Flickr and what rights their users ought or ought not to have with regards to their content. It started off with a thread in Flickr Central when Google launched their new Picasa photo sharing app and has escalated from there to Digg, TechCrunch and now Slashdot. As I've been involved in the recent debate since it started I wanted to offer up my thoughts on the matter at hand. It's important to note that yesterday I joined Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr. I've kept quiet on the posts over the weekend because I wanted to announce that before offering up anything more on the subject than I already have. As one of Flickr's heaviest users I feel that I have a decent understanding of the situation and problem at present. A number of months back Anil Dash wrote a post called "The Interesting Economy." In this post Anil posed the most basic question of all from a Flickr user's perspective, "what's in it for me?" From Anil: "But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange." Caterina Fake responded to Anil with the following: "Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it." At the time, and still today, I agree with Caterina Fake. I have always felt that I've gotten much more out of Flickr than money could ever provide and thus I've felt it more than a fair deal. I don't need to be paid by Flickr. I enjoy the generosity that Caterina speaks of and love the share and share alike spirt of Flickr. And over the past year I've spent hours and hours and hours working away at my flickrstream. Uploading new photos every day, meticulously documenting my images with detailed tags, building friends and making contacts, enjoying and sharing with everyone I meet, and participating actively in many different groups and conversations on the site. But lately I've been having some second thoughts. The central issue around the recent debate is not whether or not you can get your photographs out of Flickr. Slashdot got this really wrong when they wrote, "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting." There are several tools that have already been developed to allow exporting out of Flickr. Downloadr and Slickr come to mind immediately. You absolutely can get your photographs out of Flickr your photos are not locked up. Flickr is not the roach motel that others have been making it out to be. What is at issue is not your photos, but the metadata associated with your photos. At present Flickr does