There was a controversial thread over at Techcrunch about Flickr not opening up their API to Zooomr. Two sides promptly formed behind each company in the comments (with some pretty harsh words being said about Zooomr). The Zooomr proponents said that Flickr shouldn’t be afraid of opening up to their competitor, and that keeping their system closed harkens back to the days of Web 1.0. In the end, Butterfield of Flickr cleared it up by saying that they will indeed be opening up to competitors, as long as they reciprocate the gesture by opening their own API. This was supposedly a change of heart.

We have to remember that Flickr is a company, not some free wheeling do-gooder that will cater to anyone’s request. It should come as no suprise that Flickr woudl take some time out to carefully consider opening their API directly to their competitor. In the end, I believe that Flickr has made the right decision, which could potentially allow Zooomr users to transfer all their Flickr photos to their Zooomr account. There’s no reason for Flickr to tether their user’s content. But for people to say that this decision should be a knee-jerk reaction is quite ridiculous.

This entry was posted by James Yu on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at and is filed under On the Blogs, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.