The Flickr API is a national treasure

Declaring property belonging to someone else as a national treasure is a highly contentious issue that is often litigated. It is an odd model to follow when I think the author really just wants to convince Yahoo! to tread very carefully with a product feature.

The problem with his post is that it doesn't even attempt to point out what's in it for Yahoo!, the owners of Flickr.

You can hold the position that there doesn't need to be anything in it for Yahoo! to declare this a "national treasure", but then you are fundamentally for redefining the internet and putting in a control body to dictate API versioning just like we have a local control body to dictate what is considered historic.

May be I am taking this analogy too far but that is my point: analogies without explicitly stated boundaries are almost meaningless in communicating your position.

Let's get the government to force a private company to do something that is potentially extremely expensive and perhaps not even possible because well, because the API might break 'apps'. You're argument is terrible.

I wonder if they'll fix the API so copyright protection is not "on your honor".

As it is now you ask the API for a list of images and it gives them all to you. It's then up to you to check each image and make sure it's legal to download.

It seems to me they should just return the list of ones that are legal or at least have the option to filter the list rather than have to do it manually.

It's worse than that though. You can't use Flickr to share your images with friends and family unless you mark the images as CC. Anything else and an app is not allowed to download them

My app was banned by Flickr even though that's the use case I wrote the app for.

http://google.com/?q=flickrdown

This seems clearly more as a tongue in cheek way of telling Yahoo! how important the flickr API is than a genuine petition of the US Government.

Will someone please remind Mr Winer that the Flickr API was conceived and created (along with Flickr itself) in Canada.

While you're at it, you might as well declare Celine Dion a US National Treasure (actually I'm serious... you can take her... please?)

Their product is a national treasure that you enjoy the benefits of at no cost. Want to show them how much you value it? You could always start a petition to give Yahoo actual treasure in the form of API access fees, similar to Google's Adwords API.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea of declaring something a national treasure but the problem of companies screwing around with APIs is a big one, and it is probably better solved by having developers group together in some way to get better bargaining power against companies who do it.

The whole bait-and-switch method that a lot of large companies have employed in the past is unfair, and it usually involves companies enticing developers to pour huge amounts of resources into building on their platform, only to pull the rug out from underneath them and clamp down on API terms or ban applications (see Twitter with API tokens, Facebook with Social Reader etc).

It would probably be better if developers got together and threatened to pull all their apps off an ecosystem unless companies negotiated in good faith, even if only a small subset of developers stood to get screwed over. It's a principle which works quite well for unions aside from when they take it too far. Hopefully it wouldn't skew the balance too far either way, but it would definitely make negotiations bilateral instead of unilateral and result in a much fairer deal for developers.

How about an independent non-profit organization that monitors and assigns grades to various characteristics of a company's API? Developers could consider that as a strong signal when deciding to commit to an API. One of the problems is that it is very difficult to anticipate the kinds of issues an API relationship would cause until it is already too late. This could help with that.

Basically a BBB for APIs but ideally non-profit. The challenge would be in maintaining objectivity and conflict of interests.

The government should spend its resources on building a death star

In the alternate universe where something like this could happen, wouldn't it just result in companies being more reluctant to publish an API in the first place?

Yeah, nationalization always goes well. I'm curious though, would Yahoo! be expected to host and maintain the API at their cost according to the specifications set forth by a regulatory body, or will they just be mugged and have their property transferred to a trust owned by the government?

It's always a good thing when the government gets involved. Let's do more of that!

I'm always wary of an API that I don't pay for, less likely of a financial motivator for an API provider to maintain status quo.

This is ridiculous. A corporation's product cannot be a national treasure.

I can do a hell of a lot more parsing the HTML...

While I appreciate the sentiment, some of the supporting facts are dead wrong.

> If we didn't do this, the city where I live, New York, would have a freeway running down the middle of it.

That's not really the reason that Robert Moses's LOMEX project failed.

> There would be no Central Park.

Again, 'national landmarks' are not the reason Central Park was created, nor are they the reason it still exists

> The East Village would only have NYU dorms.

That's kind of the way Greenwich Village is heading as it is. National landmarks haven't stopped NYU from taking over the neighborhood.

> If we didn't do this, the city where I live, New York, would have a freeway running down the middle of it.

And it wouldn't take six days to get from one end of Manhattan to the other. (Edit: That was a joke, if the downvotes are originating from this sentence.)

If we're talking about LOMEX here, I don't think historical markings had anything to do with it being shot down. Residents of a couple neighborhoods in Manhattan were annoyed that half their neighborhood would be demolished to build it, as I understand.