Photobucket, acquired by Fox Interactive Media in May 2007 for $300 million, is releasing their API to the public today and will allow third party developers to build photo/video storage and visualization to their applications. Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine are being announced as launch partners. API documentation is available at developer.photobucket.com.
Previously the API was released only to signed business development partners, and had limited functionality. Functionality includes log in via OAuth, album creation and editing, content uploading, content sharing via email, search and metadata access (tags, titles, descriptions, etc.).
Photobucket is also promoting third party services on their API, at gallery.photobucket.com.
Flickr has had an API available since late 2005, with hundreds of third party applications built on the base service.
When I considered on Photosharing in 2006, I considered three: Flickr, photobucket, and smugmug. There are so much ads on photobucket that it just make me not feel enjoying the pictures. I like the view of smugmug and simplicity of Flickr.
The way to go… no turning back (and no need to)…
Photobucket is good service for image hosting but I found that many times there image hosting becomes slow and images url don’t show up the image quick or not at all. Lest see what this step do for PB.
I use them for different things:
Photobucket for sharing/dumping images, usually one at a time.
Flickr for my personal photo collection. Nicer to look at.
mike you’ve got an error in the link to http://developer.photobucket.com
We would have to agree with there being too many ads on Photobucket and we’re not quite sure they could ultimately compete with Flickr but we shall see!
@6: Forgive them for having an actual ‘business’ model and making ‘money’
Please correct your links in the post especially developer.photobucket.com
I have been noticing that techcrunch’s posts contain links with undesirable characters.
@7, advertising is not the only way to make money. Flickr charges for premium accounts and Smugmug charges for all accounts.
Flickr’s API has been available since late 2004.
rockyou and slide! whoopeee… the plague continues
Mike, when Flickr launched their video service, why didn’t you mention Photobucket launched video in December of 2005? and Flickr was playing catchup?
Let’s also not forget that Photobucket still is much bigger than flickr. March US Comscore was 20.9M for Photobucket and 14.4M for Flickr.
@9: PB offers a pro account option too.
Photobucket isn’t as good as Flickr. Somehow the whole user-friendly experience is missing. Let’s see how this will help to redeem PB