Thinkcorps

Briefly following up on my previous notion of “unionizing” your user communities, Michael at TechCrunch posts about an issue between Flickr and a new competitor, Zooomr, regarding giving API access to a competing service. It’s a portability issue, really, about whether you should offer users an easy path to export/transfer their data.

Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield initially responded in their forums:

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. ... 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?

But this issue evidently sparked some internal debate, and Stewart soon modified his stance:

... this is something that we’ve never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn’t matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric’s position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that “fair’s fair’ and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we’ll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

First, I think this is a fantastic example of how a company should react to community dischord . Even after being acquired by Yahoo, it’s pretty clear that the Flickr team has maintained its razor-like focus on its users (as evidenced by other examples Stewart mentions in that same thread). It also shows that often the “business of community” is about protecting your users over whatever internal concerns you might have.

Stewart’s “fair is fair” reciprocal API access may seem at first like a hedge, but in essence it’s about extending portability and benefiting all users. And that’s Flickr influencing the market in all of our interests (something cellphone carriers couldn’t do on their own). If Flickr does give Zooomr a commercial license, then that implies that both Flickr and Zooomr users now enjoy portability. Everybody wins.

Hmm, architecture is politics. :>