Open Letter to Stewart Butterfield and Bradley Horowitz,

Yo dudes.  I’m reading in horror of the story about Zoomr trying to get at user’s data in Flickr and import it into Zoomr.  Apparently Stewart was quoted as saying “no”.

So Yo - WASSUP?

You know this is what I’m all about and I gotta call yah on it.  Just cause Flickr was first, doesn’t mean it’s the ONLY place where people are gonna wanna store their images.  To prevent your users from moving their stuff into Zoomr - just ain’t cool.

Brad - you especially know where I’m coming from, we were just talking about this at dinner, in London two weeks ago.

So please dudes - get a grip and correct this awful attitude.  If its the issue of the cost of the bandwidth, then I’m sure there’s some way that Mr. Tate would be willing to foot the bill of the costs of moving the data over.  I would if I were he.

But as we all know full well - that data is the property of the end-users, not Flickr or Yahoo.  So preventing them from easily moving it - is just stupid.  Stewart I’m especially upset at you - you should know better!

 - marc

To Kristopher Tate - dude I’m on your side.

Let’s work together to make sure that ALL strorage sites, social networks, blogging tools, dashboards, new kinds of aggregators, - etc - all enable both Import and Export of their end-user’s data.

BUT WAIT!  Here’s what Stewart said…..

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.

He then goes on to say……

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?

If a user developed it for their own purposes and distributed it, no problem. If they imported what the various Flickr exporting tools produced, no problem. We’d never go out of our way to block them — we just wouldn’t go out of our way to help them.

And here’s the thing: back when we first started, we got asked to develop tools to bring in people’s photos in from other sites (notably Buzznet, which started before us, was larger, and was popular for cameraphone users). We actually developed a tool to do that, but never released it. Why? Because it just seemed … lame, and mean, and competitive in a bad way, at least if we did it ourselves. (If the market develops a solution on its own,again, no problem.)

So Stewart is arguing (rightly so) that they shouldn’t be expected to HELP competitors - which sounds completely reasonable to me.  But preventing pro products from building in features that automatically import data - is not cool.

That’s what we’re intending on doing - x100.

I don’t buy this differentiation between ‘individuals’ building mashups and export scripts versus professional companies who want to put a UI on it, and make it actually accessible to the other 99.98% of the people - who can’t hack.

I mean come on Stewart - can’t you see why having interfaces designed to specifically export (and Import I may add) into and out of Flickr - are a good thing?

Really - I mean it - this is a GOOD thing, not something to be blocked.  So lets figure out a way that you can be compensated and it shouldn’t cost you ANYTHING, but standing in the way and preventing it - just ain’t coolio.

Is this the same attitude Yahoo will take towards all of your web services?  Can we expect to get blocked if we want to export MyYahoo or Yahoo Groups data?  ‘Cause I was certainly counting on it - for my business plan!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 2:24 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.