Michel Roland's Bookmarks tagged api →  View Popular

C'est en testant F-Spot que j'ai découvert l'aspect moins visible des modifications apportées à Flickr. Il semble qu'ils aient mis en place une vraie gestion de services tiers. Yahoo saura sans nul doute profiter de cette nouvelle API dans sa lutte contre Google.

Nowadays, many online services offer APIs as a matter of course, but when we released ours in 2004 that was not the case (note that even now, none of the other services you mention have an API, except Zooomr's partial support of the Flickr API). Why the suspicions of us then? Like, we've been playing along for years, but it's all been an extended ploy we're somehow about to screw you? We've been extremely open and we have no problem with people building tools to export their data from Flickr (there are several already). There is no lock in.



With respect to granting a commercial API license to a direct competitor: we might not. It kind of depends on the specific product, any relationship we have with them, whether we complement each other or not, etc. In the case of a truly direct competitor (and, so far, we have very few), we probably wouldn't. And I don't see that as malicious on our part: why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?

Stewart, my concern is at the user level. If I spend hours and hours tagging my photos in flickr this data is not at present able to be exported to the best of my knowledge. It is essentially locked into flickr.

if I want to have my images indexed I think my tags will help Google better read the images in Picasa. But they are not my tags. They are flickr's tags. And the only site I've seen where I've been able to export them directly too is tabblo. I can't export them to Picasa, I can't export them to Zooomr, I can't export them to WebShots, I can't export them to Riya. I can't export them to Google Base where I suspect Google might index from most of all.

as Nicholas Carr points out, vendor lock-in is a proven business strategy that is unlikely to die anytime soon.

It’s not fairness to its competitors that Flickr should be concerned with: it’s fairness to its users.

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the release of OpenSocial -- a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.