the Onda

Lots of people have been going ga-ga over the last few days about "Zooomr," a Flickr copy that supposedly adds a couple of more features and leaves Flickr "in need of catching up" according to Mike Arrington.

I don't even want to go into the comparison between an industrial strength app capable of handling 3 million users and 100 million photos, and a hack done by a single person (if you have any doubt look for a great presentation on how Flickr scales at Cal's site, or just try Zooomer now that TechCrunch and others have sent 30-50K visitors over there). What I will focus on is David Berlind's piece: "'Trapped data' raises switching barrier to newer, sometimes better services." In it he argues that as we use online services that require our data, we have to watch the hidden lock-in when a new, "better" service comes around the corner.

Now, there are a few things that you can criticize Flickr for. But the roach motel effect is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that of all of the data-centric sites out there, Flickr is the absolute best at having a great, great, open data policy. When we started building Tabblo, we spent 6 weeks using Flickr as our backend and outside of some sluggish API calls, it was just amazing to see how much richness Flickr provided in its API, and how well thought-out it was.

But it doesn't stop there. Months later, when we sat down to integrate Flickr into Tabblo, we were again surprised at how rich the facilities are for integrating metadata from Flickr (tags, contacts, privacy settings). We were also floored by how easy the Flickr guys make it, and quite frankly, because of this, anyone launching a photo-related site today that doesn't provide Flickr integration off the bat can't be such a prodigy.

Berlind is right to point out that Webshots has a piss-poor policy for exporting data (as in, you can't) but this is also true of Shutterfly, OFoto, and Snapfish. The fact is that too many of these Generation-1 photo sites still believe that holding the high-res images hostage will drive more business through the print engines. Given how painful it is to upload high-res assets through today's asymmetrical broadband pipes, this is a really bad thing to do to your users.

Recently at a conference, I asked an employee from one of these large photo sites why they didn't just clone some part of the Flickr API as a goodwill gesture and use it to position against their other Gen-1 competitors. She told me that "Emily from Des Moines doesn't care about APIs, or high-res images." And that may in fact be true of Emily, but it certainly isn't the case with all of those new services (like us) that think they can fill some needs not currently being addressed.

I'm all for picking on Webshots, and Ofoto on their lack of openness. But Flickr? Those guys should be given a medal where open data (and metadata) policies are concerned.

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