All these points are vague and non-actionable. Here's my take:
If you've been Net Native long enough you probably remember oFoto and Shutterfly and Webshots. What happened to all these sites? Flickr.
Flickr was designed around an open API from the ground up, meaning you could take your photos and embed around the web and in other applications. You could even take other people's photos and embed them around the web and in other applications. It was pretty sweet.
As a result they quickly dominated the photo sharing scene and were bought out by Yahoo! in record time.
Flickr's sustainable competitive advantage was freedom.
Back in June the Flickr team was having an internal debate about whether or not to allow competitors to data mine their site. Flickr's founder, Stewart Butterfield, posted a comment on his blog saying,
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"T]his 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)."
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This makes sense for a non-profit like Wikipedia but it was a bad idea in this case. Flickr made their money by tapping the differential in the freedom gradient, so by requiring reciprocal openness they are literally forcing the competition to steal their sustainable advantage.
The paradox is they'd be better off just bending over and taking it. That's pretty fucked up.
Or, as Thomas Pynchon says, "If you can get them asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers."
I don't know. I can't think of any video sites offhand that are _worse_ than youtube in most respects. The player is small, grainy, hard to control. The "community" is full of appalling idiots. The search feature is the worst I've ever seen. They did scale it very well--outages seemed minimal. I'm sure that is the greatest technical challenge for video.
Flickr is a real puzzle. Any jackass could have made that site. I think the stars just aligned for them. People can flippantly say things like, "Oh, Microsoft got lucky" or whatever, because they did get some breaks. But MSFT also did real work, not easily replicated. Flickr--geez. Most online stores have a photograph engine of some sort that does the same thing, as just one tiny feature.
If you've been Net Native long enough you probably remember oFoto and Shutterfly and Webshots. What happened to all these sites? Flickr.
Flickr was designed around an open API from the ground up, meaning you could take your photos and embed around the web and in other applications. You could even take other people's photos and embed them around the web and in other applications. It was pretty sweet.
As a result they quickly dominated the photo sharing scene and were bought out by Yahoo! in record time.
Flickr's sustainable competitive advantage was freedom.
Back in June the Flickr team was having an internal debate about whether or not to allow competitors to data mine their site. Flickr's founder, Stewart Butterfield, posted a comment on his blog saying,
*******
"T]his 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)."
*******
This makes sense for a non-profit like Wikipedia but it was a bad idea in this case. Flickr made their money by tapping the differential in the freedom gradient, so by requiring reciprocal openness they are literally forcing the competition to steal their sustainable advantage.
The paradox is they'd be better off just bending over and taking it. That's pretty fucked up.
Or, as Thomas Pynchon says, "If you can get them asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers."