Open data - June 19th, 2006 [ « ] [ » ]

If you put your photos on Flickr (or i expect, whatever the Google version of it is), then according to the terms of service you own them. Unfortunately it seems like this ownership might be the same kind of ownership you get if you buy music from iTunes i.e. you can only use it in ways in which Flickr want you to unless you’re prepared to put in some considerable technical effort…

When Kristopher Tate, the founder of the feature-rich startup photosharing site Zooomr (see prior coverage), asked Flickr earlier this month for access to their Commercial API, Flickr’s response by email was that “we choose not to support use of the API for sites that are a straight alternative to Flickr.” Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield posted to a Flickr forum on Wednesday saying that when it comes to direct competitors like Zooomr, “why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?”

What’s at issue is the ability for innovative companies to build server-to-server import interfaces that make it far easier for non-technical users to try out a new service and take what they own with them. There are a number of third party tools available for Flickr users to download all their data to their computers. That data can then be uploaded into another system. Competitor Zooomr wants to make transitions like that easy to do, and Flickr apparently doesn’t want them to.

from here.

To me what it sounds like is that whilst Flickr is happy for the customer to own their data in theory, in practice they’re just as keen to lock you into their system as any oldskool software house. This appears particularly bad as a lot of Flickr’s value as a whole (to their parent company Yahoo! as well as its individual users) is derived from this data that people add and the metadata that people add around it (tags, groups, pools, labels etc.).

Is Flickrs proposed policy on the matter much better?

that we definitely should approve [full API access] requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same.
…
(a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

I mean that’s still a pretty high barrier to entry. I can appreciate that Flickr is a business and all but it seems they’ve built their reputation at least partly on customers ownership of data and putting these caveats and controls on how people access things seems a little disingenuous to say the least. It’s a similar problem to Wikipedia which is clearly an excellent resource (for some things at least, for other things it’s a list of things teenagers know) but it’s not something you necessarily want to use as a serious research tool [1] [2*] [3*]

Also: More about data portablility here.

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*don’t really agree with these two (esp. Jaron Larnier who’s a bit of a muddled hippy and has a tendency to ramble on to no good end) but they make some good points esp. about the fact that wikipedia has become a fairly standard bureuacracy.