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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."
Writing your own scripts is not terribly convenient for most people.
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RumorsDaily
That's not exactly an option if you have hundreds of pictures uploaded and want to migrate.
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.
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.
If you've spent the past two years organizing your porn collection on flickr then they notice, you might get the chance to export your photo collection to pr0nr.com
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
Setting up a Flickr-like site on one's own webserver is so far beyond the abilities of most people, probably even many educated users who don't have day jobs writing AJAX-based web applications, that to say that a roll-your-own is any competition to Flickr is pretty ridiculous.
I consider myself a fairly quick learner, and I have no doubt that with sufficient motivation I could probably patch something together on a web server to host my own photos, maybe even something that allowed easy uploading and tagging. But a nice, well-organized site like Flickr's, with nice export plugins for iPhoto -- how many man-hours would it take to code something like that?
Even if your opportunity cost is a minimum-wage job (and most people's free time is worth more than that), you'd hit the $20 a year that Flickr charges pretty quickly, I'd wager.
There are a lot of totally valid reasons for somebody with a little technical skill to run a server. Before the advent of GMail, I used to say that putting together an IMAP server to store and archive all your email across multiple accounts was indispensable. (And if you don't want to trust Google with all your stuff, it still could be.) But I'm not sure that photo sharing is one of them: sometimes the economy of scale offered by a commercial service just beats the pants off of something that even a highly-motivated average person could do by themselves easily.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
People who want to make galleries of their photos available to family and friends, for free, with tons of features (such as the ability to get your photos one hour printed at your local Target, plus great tagging and organizational features)?
Plus, if you are trying to share photos with friends and family, it's a hell of a lot more effort to IM or email them each time they want to look at a picture then it is to just have a gallery set up. They can look at the pictures anytime they want, without hassling you. They can add your pictures to their favorites, view slideshows, comment, they can even get them printed (if you let them in your preferences).
Also, I have had companies and people approach me with work based on my flickr galleries. It's a decent networking/promotion tool.
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.