What Stewart is saying makes perfect sense. I do not think this has anything to do with Flickr being afraid of Zoomr or anyone else. I do not see Riya sharing their pictures with Zoomr either!!

I agree with Matan. Zooomr is really almost a clone of Flickr with some added features - why would Flickr want to drive more traffic to them?

I’m out to say that if a direct competitor wants an API key, I’m happy to do it if they give me an equal-rights API in return.

Mike,

I think Flickr is going to be changing their position on this. This note from Stewart in a thread at Flickr Central today:

“Re API keys for direct competitors: this is something that we’ve never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn’t matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

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.

The reasoning here is partly just that “fair’s fair’ and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we’ll take this approach (still discussing it internally).”

http://www.flickr.com/groups/c.....165399644/

I’m not a huge fan of Flickr but I would agree with Stewart’s position in this instance.

Why should they deal with the load associated with a user deciding to move their data to a different service? If I want to use Zooomr or another service, it’s up to me to re-upload, not use Flickr’s cycles to do it. I am going to check into Zooomr tho

While I can understand Flickr’s reluctance to provide their API key to competitors, it not only seems like a perfect application of the API, but it’d also be in the interests of the consumer. I’m also a Mac user and I can’t imagine as many people would switch to Mac OS X if they couldn’t transfer their data from their Windows PC. For end-users’ sake, I’d love to see users be able to transfer any data to anywhere. I think this should also serve as a warning to consumers against using services that aren’t easy to switch from.

@kristopher:
I don’t get it… I just startet to play around with tabblo, another photo-site (I posted about it here: http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/?p=80 ). they offer a feature wich allows you to import your flickr-images, using the public flickr-APIs (I guess). I think zoomr could build something similar…

really like tabblo, btw

Michael, That’s exactly my point. Tabblo gets special attention? These are not Flickr’s photos, these could be your photos. Why go to a service that will lock them in?

@kristopher:
I agree, users _should_ have full control over their data…on the other hand, honestly, I did never really read flickr’s terms of agreement, they probably don’t promise you having the ability to export your data in any way…

I’m not sure if I understand ur post 100%… do you say that tabblo gets ’special attention’, i.e. better API-access than zoomr? if so, that’s a shame…

I think that if Flickr doesn’t want you to use their API then so be it. It’s not that they don’t want competition, it’s that they don’t care to waste a ton of bandwidth that goes directly to helping competition. Ads are not being served, they are not receiving hits, why would they care to allow you to have this in the first place?

In the long run, keeping the API open should pay dividends, as it just means Flickr has that advantage over other services that don’t let you export easily. It’s just another reason to sign up with flickr rather then another site. Online, you need to offer as many reasons as possible.

With regards to Flickr wasting bandwidth to support a competitor, perhaps they could charge a small fee for commerical API keys, and use this money to cover their bandwitdth costs.

It’s far more than just wasting bandwidth and processor usage.

This is the bi-product of walking a tightrope between running a business and building a community. Of course the framers of a community want to support their users in any way they can, and giving people the freedom to move in and out of different communities is a serious concern. However if you’re in it for the scratch, then I don’t believe you can justify the resources to make it easier for your customers to walk across the street and buy the other cat’s lemonade.While I can agree with Stewart’s changing position,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.ultimately you’ve got to come down on the community side or the business side. If you can craft a business model that doesn’t directly depend on the number of users you’ve got, then you’re in like Flynnt. But seeing how that’s a tough genome to map, even if you build a civil relationship with the cat across the street, at the end of the day either he’s selling lemonade or you are.

You people are missing the point. Easy export is a Flickr feature issue. Stewart Butterfield chooses to make his product less usable so that he doesn’t lose business. (the bandwidth issue when raised is almost always a laughable pretext) That’s fine by him but I wouldn’t be bragging about it on message boards.

My Opinion: Flickr will have more users and more usage over time if people know that they are not trying to silo their picture data. Flickr should stay open and let people export pictures from the service using an API. And the reason they should do it is because it will help them grow.

Do they currently allow, through the API, to upload images into an account?

kris: you’ve tried to piggyback off flickr’s success quite enough. let it go.

Agree with doomr. Stop whining Kris.

Doomr, I don’t see Flickr as a competitor — I’m going after something that Flickr could only imagine. You’ll see more if it come to life in Zooomr 2.

-Kristopher

Using Flickr is not so much about the photos as it is about the community (groups/comments/favourites/contacts). It’s not like Flickr users don’t have their images on a harddrive somewhere, unless they didn’t learn the lesson of one of the earliest photo sharing sites, “Photopoint”. Back in 2001, Photopoint got tremendous flack when they shut down (due to financial troubles) and users who claimed they didn’t have any backups of their own photos were left stranded.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-277127.html

Users should have a quick and easy way of exporting all data about their own photos.

Damon hasz the great point. We have an API at golfnow and there is an upcharge for each round sold.

Chmod -o

It’s interesting to watch where the line will be drawn between the ideals and the commercial reality of Web 2.0.

I don’t know the specifics but couldn’t Flickr restrict the API to just the image data and keep the juicy goodness of the meta-data secret from competitors?

@Kristopher:

I think you might have been a little hasty. The old “I don’t see them as a competitor” line is being trot out too often nowadays. Are you telling me that if a person goes and uploads pictures on flickr, that they might also upload those same pics onto zooomr? Or, alternatively, will people only upload certain pictures to flickr, and certain different pictures to zooomr, meaning you two aren’t competing for the same photos? I don’t think I believe either of these scenarios. Instead, I think people who haven’t already made their mind up will evaluate one, the other, or both services then decide on just one, uploading all pictures to that site. Seems like competition to me, though I’m interested to see what’s coming up with zooomr 2.

I simply don’t understand how one can say “I don’t see them as a competitor” when you have placed yourself as exactly that by mimicking their domain name.

Zach, Let me better rephrase what I’m trying to get at.

Even-though we’re sharing photos, there are many things that Zooomr will be doing differently than Flickr — Allow me to say that Flickr is really cool, and has its place — and that I like Yahoo very much as a company. But, where Flickr falls-off and Zooomr begins is advanced metadata management. Zooomr 2 will allow users to get a lot of of the information they enter. Flickr only sorts by relevance and time — Zooomr does relevance, time, and space — among others, as well.

In any case, I think it’s about time that these huge companies and their properties on the Web open-up their users’ data (remember, this would be a different argument if the data was owned by Yahoo/Flickr).

In an age of RSS, SOAP, XMLRPC, and OPML, ‘Roach Motel’ is so Web 1.0

-Kristopher

How come people are only attacking Flickr here? What about the website that claims to be the largest photo-sharing website on the planet–Facebook (they claim this in their media kit.) Facebook never takes any heat but doesn’t even let you export your .csv or contacts through an API. What about Riya? Not to mention the snapfish, ofotos, etc… I think user-data portability is a huge issue, but let’s open this up to the whole web.

I want to see Flickr be the leader in this space (I don’t want to have to move all of my pics), but if someone else can out-innovate you and do it faster, they should win.

Why would anyone want to take their pictures off of Filckr? Oh yeah, there is the Second Life “Not in Public Site Areas” aka NIPSA thing. This is reminding me of when everyone dumped Friendster for MySpace because Friendster kept deleting faksters. Hey Stewart, take a look at 37S’s Getting Real, page 166. “Look at Flickr. It began as a multiplayer online game Called The Game Neverending. Its creators soon realized that photo-sharing aspect of the game was more plausible…” You were willing to change your course then, but now you are ignoring the need to change? What gives? You can keep users from leaving by letting users post Second Life screenshots and letting sites like Zooomr use your API. This is not very web 2.0 of you. At this rate you will be the next Friendster. So cool at the beginning, but lost value when it’s maven users were scolded for not being able to do what they wanted to.

@Richard Harrison
Why would you want to do it that way? All that is going to do is punish the user, and for what? Just because Flickr and Zooomr are competitors?

why the fuck are you covering this zoomr shit? noone else cares, just because the kid is a kid you are covering this.

it will die when the kid has to go to CLASS. Let’s move on and cover a REAL STARTUP, MIKE.

“Doomr, I don’t see Flickr as a competitor”

My bad. I guess it was your copying flickr’s name, website, and business model that confused me.

“You’ll see more if it come to life in Zooomr 2.”

No, I won’t.

A few interesting tidbits regarding Zooomr:

1 - Frontpage looks exactly like Flickr
2 - ‘All sizes’ section of photo zooming looks exactly like Flickr
3 - “Photo Information” looks exactly like Flickr
4 - Company naming style is exactly like Flickr
5 - URL architecture similiar to Flickr (not major tho)

One bug I noticed while looking around:

1 - URL posted in Trackbacks need to be unhtmlentities’d (if you know what that means) - http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/kris_tate/1722

Kristopher Tate

June 16th, 2006 at 3:39 pm

I’m out to say that if a direct competitor wants an API key, I’m happy to do it if they give me an equal-rights API in return

Reply :

Flickr is the first photo sharing and zooomr is the new comer ( a copy cat ) . If You were Steve you will do the same because you are a NEW COMER and you want people to see zooomr.

For example :

Lets say you are the founder of flickr ( as the most famous photo sharing website ) , I am pretty sure you would not want to do what Steve would not do, because you basically want to ” steal ” flickr’s customers.

Your comment is totally unacceptable

Web 2.0 services like Flickr are a stop-gap. The only long-term, viable solution is for every user to have their own brainless-to-use web server running their own Myspace/Flickr/Calendar/etc. services over their broadband connections, with P2P mirroring among friends’ PCs to alleviate connectivity, popularity, and backup issues.

I take Flickr’s side on this issue. Regarding the argument which Mike and Tate bring out regarding Flickr locking out user’s photos, it is not true.

Flickr ofcourse lets individual users to download their photos using their own personal API key. They’re just refusing a commercial API key to Zoomr to do it for you. So technically if a user thinks Zoomr is awesome, he can always install a third-party tool to download all his Flickr photos and upload them into Zoomr.

I think any sane CEO with good market share would refuse to do what Tate wants.

@Tate
Regarding Tate’s equal-rights API deal, dude are you even in an equal position to bargain with Flickr?

This is real Web2.0 as defined by O’Reilly in his submarine patent and takedown of any competing conferences.

1) promote open use
2) use this to gain community content
3) stab users in back
4) asshat…er profit

I think Flicker are this years first contender for the O’Reilly Web2.0 assho of the year award.
Don’t worry Tim you’ll always be the original web2.0 assho

Flickr is totally awesome.
Zoomr is not there yet.
It seems a bit unfriendly this move - can’t they just ask for the bandwith money / cpu electricity costs.
As usual though it is the community member that loses out.

Its one thing to ask Flickr to waste cycles implementing something from scratch but it sounds like they already had this functionality.

There are ways to get around this stuff. Just be a real man and scrape the html :)…

The question is whether they will block your IPs. Delicious is horrible at this. I wanted to use some of their data set to tune an algorithm I was writing and they blocked me after one week.

Their response was essentially that unless I was giving them money or making them benefit in some how that they wouldn’t give me access.

Unfortunately this didn’t even all experimentation as I had NO idea whether my idea would work.

I guess Joshua can’t write scalable code so my crawler was hurting his precious RSS feed

Kevin

If I were Flickr, I’d give them access to the API… and charge ‘em $5.00 (or something) for every account they import. That would put competitors in a position where they must be committed to acquiring the customer, rather than simply leeching from someone else’s work.

Either way, this issue has nothing to do with “silos” or “walled gardens”. If I can back up my Flickr data to my desktop, they owe me absolutely nothing more. Or put another way:

When I moved my furniture into my rental home, the owner never suggested for a moment that he was taking ownership of my stuff. I’m free to move it in or out as I please. But acknowledging my ownership and paying my expenses when I decide to move elsewhere are very different things.

I’ve got a startup blog called WebCrunchr.com, and I’m going to write about all the latest Web 2.0 startups. I’m going to have reviews, screenshots and a podcast which I’m planning to call ‘TalkCrunchr’. Don’t worry Mike ’cause I don’t see us as competitors. Let me know if you’d like to cover the launch.

/sarcasm

Seriously though, people don’t realize how much balls completely opening up the Flickr data would take, and how much of a massive impact that would have on “Web 2.0″. Flickr has set the standard with so many things, and I believe that this would be their most important and most progressive accomplishment to date.

PS. Opening up Flickr data would also be a great additional product differentiator from the Yahoo Photos offering.

I am with Flickr on this. Those who stand on the sidelines, and don’t have to build a business model themselves are too quick jump in with idealistic notions about community. Building a community is about allowing users to control their content in a way that allows them to share and distribute it, not necessarily to move it wholesale from provider to provider.

As a customer of Flickr, I have never had the expectation that they would provide a service for me to move all my photos to a competitor. As a business person and a consumer that is beyond what I would expect.

i really really doubt flickr care.

this is what i got from Zooomr.com:

KeyError Python 2.4.2: /usr/bin/python2.4
Fri Jun 16 20:45:28 2006

A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to the error, in the order they occurred.

/var/www/beta.zooomr.com/cgi-bin/flup/server/fcgi_base.py in run(self=)
558 “”"Runs the handler, flushes the streams, and ends the request.”"”

559 try:

560 protocolStatus, appStatus = self.server.handler(self)

561 except:

562 traceback.print_exc(file=self.stderr)

protocolStatus undefined, appStatus undefined, self = , self.server = , self.server.handler = >
/var/www/beta.zooomr.com/cgi-bin/flup/server/fcgi_base.py in handler(self=, req=)
1098 self._appLock.acquire()

1099 try:

1100 result = self.application(environ, start_response)

1101 try:

1102 for data in result:

result = None, self = , self.application = , environ = {’DOCUMENT_ROOT’: ‘/var/www/beta.zooomr.com’, ‘GATEWAY_INTERFACE’: ‘CGI/1.1′, ‘HTTP_ACCEPT’: ‘*/*’, ‘HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING’: ‘gzip, deflate’, ‘HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE’: ‘en-gb’, ‘HTTP_CONNECTION’: ‘Keep-Alive’, ‘HTTP_COOKIE’: ‘jonsid=53e7a4324564545645669c3893c3′, ‘HTTP_HOST’: ‘beta.zooomr.com’, ‘HTTP_REFERER’: ‘http://www.techcrunchr.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-of-zoomr/’, ‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’: ‘Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GiffoBrowser9000)’, …}, start_response =

your comment ” Afraid ” is not a very suitable word

are you taking zooomr side ?

Mike, excuse me, but … this is horseshit. First, you selectively quote, second you obviously talked to Kris from Zooomr before posted but didn’t contact us, third we’re not a silo — there are already several tools which allow you to backup everything from Flickr and we’re fine with that — fourth, this was part of an ongoing discussion: the policy we’re most likely to adopt (posted before this post went up) was that we’d grant a commercial API key to competitors who had complete published APIs of their own and were willing to reciprocally grant us access to build an import tool (I doubt we’d ever do this, but that’s really the point).

Finally, “Flickr should stay open and let people export pictures from the service using an API.”: We do. And have since the beginning. “Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere.” OK … starting when?

When Zooomr has a complete and published API and is willing to give us access, we’d be happy to talk again.

Oops - just realized that the original post didn’t come from Mike (but from one Marshall Kirkpatrick). My apologies. But, it’s still horseshit …

I’m seeing some interesting erros on the zooomr site. Did techcrunch traffic kill it?

Not a great way to launch a site…

>>>>>>>>>

wait a second –the site is back up again.

Kristopher likes Yahoo as a company? What on earth? I can’t see how anyone can stand anything that Yahoo do. Honestly, the moment they buy up something I’m interested in I begin to move away instinctively…Major minus geek cred.

I’m with Flickr on this issue, although in saying that I don’t use Flickr because their terms of use put me off (yes I actually read them, shock horror ). That and they’re yahoo.

And to those crying about copying of ideas, please kindly get over it. Yes, it’s somewhat annoying, but it’s life. Sure it’s bad in a lot of cases (such as myspace/bebo/bingbox/100 identical clones) but it can also be good. For example: in NZ trademe (www.trademe.co.nz) has taken the ideas behind ebay and improved upon it, realising a better product and making the internet a better place for the users. Also digg to a certain extent, taking the idea of slashdot and adding a touch of prettyness and a touch less elitism, creating a place that is better overall imo.

People vouching for Zooomr:

Do you understand how business works, at all?

Good gosh.

Flickr spent time, money, effort, energy, venture capital, etc., etc., etc. Now, you people expect them to hand out their data? To a competitor, no less? (!!)

What do they get in return?

The moral satisfaction of “doing good?”

Is that more important than risking the careers of your people, killing the application, and screwing investors of their millions?

Amazing.

You people are really something. Good luck trying to run a business. You won’t have cash. Oh, but make sure you have those PayPal Donate buttons somewhere!

Good gosh. TechCrunch commentary is an absolute joke.

I’m on flickr’s side on this one.

Zooomr lovers are living in cuckoo land

1. I don’t understand why Zooomr can’t use the APIs available right now to transfer photographs. I know several services that allow downloads from flickr. Shouldn’t that be enough? There is a wordpress plugin called “Flickr Photo Album” that gets the pictures with all the metadata including notes.

2. Zooomr is not a copy cat. Just because it is a similar service doesn’t make it a copy cat. Are google, yahoo, and msn copycats because they provide search capabilities? Zooomr is just an alternative, and not a copy.

3. Zooomr also has a great features package. Apart from the Gamma release of Flickr, I haven’t seen any changes. Their features have stayed stagnant for a while, and all they have updates is the organization. This is while Zooomr has been adding addons. There are so many things that I would want on Flickr like trackbacks, geo-tagging, and a fully featured photo management and upload tool like Picasa2.

4. Do you really see a mass exodus of paying customers going to Zooomr? I have payed the subscription fee, and don’t see myself wasting it. If Zooomr turns out to be a better option at the end of my subscription, then I’ll switch. But Flickr is still the top option for me because of its powerful community, and external support.

If you use the API for your website, smaller projects, even commercial ones, you still forward visitors to the original flickr pages. And even if they don’t subscribe and pay for the service they make up the audience flickr users like.

Gosh! If you owned your own company, would you provide access to strangers? Would you give away your sweets for a competitor’s customers? Flickr isn’t some kind of open source software, so why should they give away their service for free?

I think Flickr has an amazing policy on API access. And that’s a part of their success.