[aresant]

I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet.

"Where good companies go to die" is the story of most acquisitions but Flickr still feels like it has great potential.

Why don't big companies figure out a "entrepreneurial outreach" program or something - stick in a good driver with a big incentive for turning around, or carve out as independent similar to Reddit in Conde?

[harryf]

A little story about Flickr...

I work for a local search engine in Switzerland - http://www.local.ch

Back in 2007 we were really interested in integrating content from flickr in much the same way as Panoramio is on Google Maps. Interested enough to pay reasonable license or usage fees. But as it clearly states here http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ (not much has changed since 2007)

> The Flickr API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers. Commercial use is possible by prior arrangement.

Although we weren't going to make money with it _directly_, we are a for-profit business, and having content from flickr would have made us more attractive to users.

So we followed the official procedure to request use for the API for commercial reasons - http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html

> Currently, commercial use of the API is allowed only with prior permission. Requests for API keys intended for commercial use are reviewed by staff. If your project is personal, artistic, free or otherwise non-commercial please don't request a commercial key. If your project is commercial, please provide sufficient detail to help us decide. Thanks!

We did, carefully describing what we wanted to use it for.

Reaction: zero. Nothing. Not even an automated acknowledgement.

And OK if we _really_ _really_ wanted their content, we would have found someone who knows someone but it wasn't _that_ important to us - it was just a nice feature we wanted to add part of our site. But that's not the point...

Building revenue streams around flickr is a no-brainer. They could provide channels, complete with payment, to help photographers sell their content or in crowdsourcing; commission work via flickr "I want pictures of all the storefronts in the high street of this town". But if you ignore the people trying to give you their money...

[lkrubner]

Interesting. We had a very similar experience with Technorati in 2007. We were working on a system for controlling pingbacks based on the "authority" ranking that the pinging site had, and we wanted to use the Technorati "authority" rankings. We wrote to them many, many times, using the official contact page, we offered to pay them, and then, we heard nothing. Getting desperate, we tracked down the company email addresses of some of the people who work there, and wrote to those. And we still heard nothing. We came back to the idea 3 months later and wrote again. And again we heard nothing. We came back to the idea 5 months later, and wrote them again, and again we heard nothing. When a company says "Commercial use of our API requires payment" and then you say "We would be happy to pay, please send us an API key" and then they do nothing, then you can tell that company has abandoned their API effort, but they've forgotten to take it down. And that leads to frustration.

[bradly]

I had the exact same experience. At my last startup webuilds a social publishing tool used by multiple fortune 500 companies. We tried to get a commercial API for months, but never heard anything back. We sent email, filed support tickets, but nothing. Eventually we gave up and the companies we serviced ended up just publishing pictures to Facebook and Twitter instead.

[bad_user]

I had the same experience with LinkedIn - sent them an email that I want access to their API and in return I received nothing.

[tha-dude]

As far as Yahoo's search API (BOSS) is concerned, their product management has been helpful and straightforward to communicate with. They allowed us to bend the TOS our way and approved a special use case.