20 Dec 2004 | Brandon said...

Another great service, but where's the money? Are they making any? What's the point of building a service that may not be sustainable? Great, there a billion photos up there now, but if Flickr can't stay in business then... well, what a waste of time for everyone involved.

20 Dec 2004 | Jamie said...

Nevermind Flickr. You have some hot friends dude.

20 Dec 2004 | Alex King said...

Brandon,

I'm guessing it is sustained by revenue from Google Adsense, as you can see from pages like this one.

20 Dec 2004 | Gus said...

Flickr also sells "pro" memberships for people who want to store alot of photos and use alot of bandwidth. If you spend some time on the site you'll see quite a few members with a "pro" icon next to their name. I imagine at some point they'll get into printing too.

20 Dec 2004 | plemeljr said...

re: income - there are " pro accounts" which I would guess (along with AdWords) help pay for the upkeep of the service.

20 Dec 2004 | Darrel said...

I've been desparately looking for an online photo development site that offers a (IMHO) rather basic set of features. It's been a while since I've developed photos online, and I'm rather appalled at the crapiness of most of the online photo sites.

A lot of people have been hyping Flickr...I think their key to some income is to hook up with a photo processor.

Though the open API looks like a great tool. What some smart photo-development shop needs to do is just whip up an interface to flicker via the API.

20 Dec 2004 | beto said...

Being a recent Flickr convert, I just have to agree with all that. The site itself is a whole, almost perfect lesson in user experience. The blog integration tool is a godsend - with some custom hacking, I got it to display a single thumbnail of whatever pic I fancy to "blog" on my home page, for instance.

Plus, the more you use it, the more your needs will lean towards a "Pro" account anyway, with increased storage bandwidth etc. I'm still kind of testing the waters, but after doing the math and the cost/benefit ratio, it's likely I'd upgrade sooner or later, so it's not like they are losing money with me.

20 Dec 2004 | Kostas said...

Darrel, my company is developing a web services based API to digital photo printing services. Any site can use it to offer digital printing services to its users. For example, a photo site could outsource its printing needs to us, or just about any site could use it to sell branded merchandise (tshirts, mousepads, mugs, etc). They'd submit orders to us using the XML-RPC (or SOAP) API and we'd take care of printing, shipping, etc.

So, someone could conceivably combine our services and API with Flickr's API and do what you've suggested.

E-mail me if you're interested in learning more.

20 Dec 2004 | Martin said...

I like Flickr, but where it fails for me, is in the same area that Writeboard fails: my property is stored on their servers, and the integrity, safety and rights of that property can never be fully guaranteed.

You only need to take a look at what happened to moblog.co.uk last week - they had a catastrophic infrastructure failure that caused the total loss of user images posted from the September 22 through December 13.

What I want is a version of Flickr that I can plug in to my website, which I can control and administrate all on my own and publish to wherever I like - a bit like what Blogger does.

And as Brandon said in the first comment: what if they go out of business?

What a total waste of time for everyone involved.

20 Dec 2004 | JF said...

You only need to take a look at what happened to moblog.co.uk last week - they had a catastrophic infrastructure failure that caused the total loss of user images posted from the September 22 through December 13.M

I'm just curious... How often do you back up your own computer? A lot of people bring up the "catastrophic infrastructure failure scenario" when talking about ASPs, but what about that scenario on your own machine?

I can't speak for Flickr, but Basecamp is backed up nightly both on and off site, plus data is on RAID 10. Sure, catastrophic infrastructure failures can happen, but they can happen anywhere and nightly backups and RAID 10 sure go a long way to make recovery a lot easier than the options most people have on their own servers or home PCs.

20 Dec 2004 | etherdust said...

More a concern to me than "catastrophic infrastructure failure" is "catastrophic business failure". More business fail than succeed. The ratio is even worse in the on-line world. We've seen business fail abruptly and people lose the data stored there.

I back up my server at home every day. I rotate copies of the backups off-site once every week. How will I get my photos back if a) Flickr is the only place I store them and b) they go toes up?

Other than that concern, Flickr seems to be a pretty cool concept. I hope they beat the odds.

20 Dec 2004 | Ryan Mahoney said...

In my e-commerce software, I provide customers the ability to download their entire database of orders, products, categories, customers etc. I'm sure Flickr and Basecamp could give their paying users similar capabilities. I understand that it's not the same as owning a copy of the software, but at least in a worst case scenario the customer wouldn't be starting from scratch.

21 Dec 2004 | Alex King said...

Ryan,
Basecamp already lets their customers download their data, through the "Export all messages and comments in XML" link on the dashboard. I'm not sure about Flickr, however.

21 Dec 2004 | Kevin Cannon said...

Martin, to be completely honest, that's a fairly useless argument, and certainly isn't important for most people. I'd wager their servers are probably more reliable and secure than your average home PC.

Being able to get a copy of your photos on DVD, or to download them all in a big zip, would definately be of benefit, but that's more of a small issue, rather than a dealbreaker.

21 Dec 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

I think the backup/data safety issue centers on trust. You can tell customers that you'll back up their data every night on- and off-site, but unless they know you and have enough experience dealing with you to trust what you say, they might wonder whether it's really true. If I were dealing with a service like Flickr or someone else that I don't know, I might feel uneasy if there were no way for me to keep a local copy of my site or photos as a precaution.

This may be one of those cases where providing a way to easily export a copy to a customer's local machine would be a valuable feature even if it's not necessary. It's like what happened with TextMate: the first version had no preferences pane because the software's designers felt it didn't need one. But it seems enough customers complained that they wanted one that now TextMate has a preferences window. Sometimes you have to provide features that are redundant or unnecessary in order to appease some concern on the part of your customers. I think anyone who has lost important data due to someone else's failure to do proper backups on a server is always going to want the ability to keep local copies and back them up themselves just as a precaution.

21 Dec 2004 | Per said...

You're uploading the pictures yourself right? So you already have a local copy stored in your computer before it's even on the Flickr site.

Instant backup.

21 Dec 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

Actually Flickr allows you to upload directly from a camera or phone, not just your computer, so assuming that you erase those photos from your camera you do not in fact always have a backup.

22 Dec 2004 | Michal Migurski said...

Regarding backups from Flickr:
I don't think they offer this as a service, but they do have a beautifully open API. Having some experience working with it, I can tell you it would be a one-day hack to write a complete Flickr photo export/backup tool.

22 Dec 2004 | striatic said...

the developers have mentioned letting users order a DVD of their images and some degree of meta-data. down the road.

of course, you can do a massive download of all of your images + metadata today, using the API that michal mentioned.

flickr has multiple redundant images servers, as well as an offsite backup. the TOS makes it absolutely clear that you retain full rights over you images, they don't even make a claim on your images for promotional purposes.

now, when we get some news that flickr kills an API key for an application that does a bandthwidth responsible backup of your photos ..

23 Dec 2004 | Martin said...

With all due respect Kevin, my argument is not "completely useless".

My argument centres around the basic protection of my property, and not just the physical data storage element. I'm also talking about rights.

I've argued before about products like Writeboard storing my data on the host's servers, which means that the data can never be adequately protected from prying eyes (ie the SvN sysadmin, for example). That's my first issue.

The second issue is about the integrity of that data. A basic Flickr login is entirely free at the moment, so there's almost no obligation on their part to guarantee me that they'll take care of my images. Saying they will doesn't cut it. Tell that to the people who lost images on moblog.co.uk

You're also making the assumption that I am always going to be uploading images from the same PC, so your argument about the security of the "average home PC" is a useless red herring.

What if I don't actually own a PC? What if I upload images from an internet cafe? What if I'm on holiday when I send up images to Flickr? What if I use my office PC?

All I want from Flickr is the front end - which I'm willing to pay for - is that so unreasonable to ask for, or for them to provide?