Photobucket, is making a significant change aimed to weave the widely used photo-sharing site more tightly into the Web 2.0 fabric.
The company is releasing an application programming interface (API) for its site, said Chief Executive Alex Welch. That means that ordinary developers will be able to build more sophisticated services around the Photobucket services and content.
Photobucket CEO Alex Welch
(Credit: Photobucket)Photobucket already made its API available to commercial partners, but now ordinary coders will be able to get access by signing up on the Web site, Welch said. The company is announcing the news in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
"What's happened in the developer community is that we have a ton of developers writing applications for OpenSocial and Facebook. There's a huge appetite for writing against these APIs," Welch said, and now it's time for Photobucket to take the plunge.
Ultimately, Welch believes the move will mean more Web site traffic for PhotoBucket and potentially lucrative advertising and sponsorship deals. Toyota, for example, sponsored a Photobucket partnership with an online image-editing tool, FotoFlexer.
Missing from Welch's peer-pressure list is Flickr, a Yahoo photo site that rivals Photobucket in scale. But Walsh wasn't afraid to give his competitor some props. "I think it's a fairly well done API," Welch said. "It's been interesting to watch and learn from."
The API will let developers write applications that can be used to log in to accounts, upload photos and videos, search public content, access and change metadata such as titles and tags, and share content through e-mail, Photobucket said.
Following Flickr
For an illustration of what an open API can get you, look no farther than Photophlow, a site that builds a lively photo-sharing and chat room interface atop Flickr. With it, users can post photos into a chat room for discussion, add comments directly onto the Flickr site, and flag pictures as favorites in their own Flickr account. It was put together without formal help from Flickr.
The API makes Photophlow on Photobucket possible, said Photophlow co-founder Neil Berkman. "We're interested in enabling real-time media sharing in a variety of contexts, and since Photobucket is one of the largest hosts of photos and video, we'd certainly consider building on top of their API," he said. "Their audience is a bit different from Flickr's, so this would likely be a separate application, taking advantage of the same technical core we've built Photophlow on," he added.
Web 2.0 loosely refers to the gradual rebuilding of the Internet as a more interactive domain, with users supplying their own content, information from one Web site being embedded into services from another, and bloggers avidly commenting on all the developments. APIs are the mechanism by which much of those interconnections are made, and without them, a Web site risks being an island unto itself.
Photobucket got its start as a no-frills site that could store photos, but hardly as an island. It's widely used to host pictures that actually appear on Web sites such as MySpace, eBay, or Facebook. And after Photobucket's 2007 acquisition, it's a part of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media division, along with MySpace. And it's gradually become more fully featured.
Programmers who want to use Photobucket's API can sign up for a free key online, Welch said, and they're free to try to profit from the resulting work. "For the small developer, we're not concerned if they're monetizing it in some way," Welch said.
Some developer limitations
Well, not concerned up to a point. The developer API will let Photobucket throttle Web site traffic to prevent abuse, but the company will watch for busy applications that could be new business opportunities, he added.
"If we see a noncommercial application that's doing something clearly in our commercial terms of service or doing something very creative, it's our responsibility to go out and figure a way to partner," Welch said.
Current partners using Photobucket's commercial API include FotoFlexer and TiVo, which can present slideshows on TVs drawn from Photobucket members' accounts and let people search Photobucket content.
The company will announce several new partnerships Tuesday, too:
• Intercasting is working on technology that could let mobile phone users upload their pictures taken with camera phones to Photobucket accounts.
• Snapvine is integrating Photobucket into its Web-based audio commentary and blogging technology.
• Time Warner's AOL will launch an application called BlueString that will let people browse Photobucket and other content.
Photobucket's move is just the latest in a long line of companies to woo programmers; that courtship has moved online as the Web has grown to house rich, sophisticated applications.
Even if many impressive but unprofitable Web sites fall by the wayside, those with the programming skills will likely stay gainfully employed. A Monday report by analyst firm Forrester says corporations will spend a lot of money to use Web 2.0 technologies within their walls. In the report, the firm predicts growth from $764 million in spending in 2008 to $4.65 billion in 2013.
Open-source fans can be a skeptical bunch, but I've seen their collective opinions shift--for example in the gradually diminishing loathing for Sun Microsystems as that company stopped deriding Linux and started moving its portfolio to open-source software.
So it's not a surprise that various representatives had a mixed reaction to Microsoft's move Thursday to share details of its technology with open-source programmers.
The move could make it easier for many projects to work well with Microsoft products and potentially replace them--for example the Thunderbird e-mail software could communicate better with Microsoft Exchange servers and also displace Microsoft Outlook on PCs. But Microsoft also made it clear that a pledge not to sue open-source programmers only applied in "non-commercial" contexts, so open-source fans didn't get everything they want.
And even though Microsoft said it now will share the specific list of patents it says it has on technology it wants to license to others--something open-source fans have sought once Microsoft asserted last year that Linux and other projects violate 235 patents--some see signing licenses as incompatible with open-source license requirements.
For its part, Microsoft is pledging to move beyond its historically adversarial treatment of the open-source realm. "As Microsoft takes this significant step forward into the interconnected world of the future, we aspire to doing so with members of the open source community by our side now and for the long haul," said Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, on his blog. Hilf previously ran Microsoft's Linux lab and was an Linux deployment specialist at IBM.
I surveyed various companies and individuals about the move and received some other thoughts unsolicited. Here are some reactions:
• Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director: "The world of software development has been marching in a steady direction toward being open and transparent. As Linux's use continues to rise, so does the demand for customers to enable it to interoperate with Microsoft products. This announcement by Microsoft seems to indicate they want to participate in that march. Even if some of the announced details still seem less than ideal for open source developers, at least it's a first step."
• Michael Cunningham, Red Hat's general counsel: "Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:
"Commit to open standards: Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML, Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization's meeting next week in Geneva...
"Commit to interoperability with open source: Instead of offering a patent license for its protocol information on the basis of licensing arrangements it knows are incompatible with the GPL (General Public License)--the world's most widely used open source software license--Microsoft should extend its Open Specification Promise to all of the interoperability information that it is announcing today will be made available...
"Commit to competition on a level playing field: Microsoft's announcement today appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open-source community. How else can you explain a 'promise not to sue open-source developers' as long as they develop and distribute only 'non-commercial' implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous."
• Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project and a Novell programmer working on Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software: "As a chess move, it is a fascinating one...On the surface it looks very good. (There are) lots of things that we want to interoperate with--Office, SQL Server, SharePoint. Getting the documentation to everyone sounds great, and it seems like they are serious about doing more interoperability work...When the full list for patents becomes available, the question is what will open-source vendors do if they find pieces that have historically infringed: will they choose to license and be the recipients of the community wrath, or will they hold their grounds and risk a lawsuit?"
• Jeremy Allison, a founder of the Samba open-source project: "The devil is in the details. If they can follow through with this, the world will be a better place...It doesn't mean any change for us (Samba) as we already had all these documents, and the promise not to sue is only for 'non-commercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless. At least everyone now gets access to the same info, which I'm very happy about. Hey, should we ask for our money back ? :-)."
• Matt Asay, vice president of business development for Alfresco and a writer for CNET's Blog Network: "The really big news is Microsoft's commitment to open APIs (application programming interfaces) and open protocols...It's great news, and it's big news. My company has been seeking this API and protocol information for months (years, really). But Microsoft's pledge doesn't obviate the need to negotiate patent royalties, if required, with the company."
• Andi Gutmans, a co-founder of Zend: "I have no doubt Microsoft is doing the right thing for their business. I believe Microsoft has finally understood that their closed nature has significantly hindered the growth of their ecosystem...Microsoft has had a strong Microsoft-centric ecosystem, but going down this path they are able to extend their applicable market beyond today's reach...I believe the PHP community can only benefit from this move. With PHP being a heterogeneous solution which works on pretty much any operating system, any database and any Web Server; the more interoperability capabilities it has with all open-source and proprietary solutions the better...Microsoft's all or nothing approach has been an accelerator for the adoption of open-source operating systems. While I am a big fan of Linux, I do believe that this is going to put an increasing amount of pressure on the Linux/Unix backers to deliver innovation and value on top of these systems."
Update 5:32 p.m.: I added commentary from Microsoft's Bill Hilf.Microsoft made major concessions Thursday that should make it easier for open-source software to dovetail with or even replace Microsoft products, but a major caveat means the company's legal threats remain alive and well.
Microsoft announced a number of moves that could significantly improve its relationship with the open-source world. Among other things, the company said it will share communication protocols that govern how Microsoft software products communicate; pledged not to sue open-source programmers for developing software that uses those interfaces; and launched an Open Source Interoperability Initiative to improve how well open-source software works with its own.
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (left) and CEO Steve Ballmer.
(Credit: Microsoft)Although programmers now are apparently free to reproduce the software, Microsoft's generosity ends when the software crosses the threshold from project to commercial product.
"Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open-source developers for development or noncommercial distribution of implementations of these protocols," the company said. "Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license."
In other words, Microsoft hasn't backed down from its insistence that its intellectual property isn't free for the taking, an assertion made most clearly in 2007 when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Linux and other open-source projects violate 235 Microsoft patents.
"The promise not to sue is only for 'noncommercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless," said Jeremy Allison, a founder of the open-source Samba project that lets Linux servers substitute for Windows file and print servers by emulating the required Microsoft communication protocols.
The Thursday move suggests two forms of patent agreements. First is one in the mold of the controversial Microsoft partnership with Novell from 2006 and various other smaller Linux companies afterward. The second is an agreement directly with customers that use open-source software such as Red Hat's Linux, as Ballmer suggested last October when he said, "People (who) use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us."
It's not likely Microsoft opened up its specifications and made its pledges Thursday out of the goodness of its heart. As the open-source movement and its free-software predecessor have matured over more than two decades, Microsoft has found it necessary to make accommodations.
First, the open-source programming philosophy outdid Microsoft in an area where it previously had been a leader, fostering communities of developers. Second, there have been years of antitrust litigation, first by the United States and more recently from the European Union, that called on Microsoft to share. The third, and perhaps strongest reason, is that open-source software has become a powerful force in the software industry and customer sites--and even at Yahoo, the Internet company Microsoft is trying to acquire for $44.6 billion in part because of its engineering expertise.
The Samba case illustrates the pressures on Microsoft. In December, Samba announced a complicated third-party arrangement that in effect gives it access to Microsoft's communication protocols, a move that came shortly after the European Union required Microsoft to share interoperability information with open-source projects.
Sharing protocols, while it makes it easier for others to interoperate or clone Microsoft products, also could serve to entrench Microsoft's products by making its in-house protocols into de facto industry standards.
Take OOXML, the office document format Microsoft is trying to standardize as an alternative to the ODF that was spawned from the OpenOffice.org software, an open-source rival to Microsoft Office. "The approval of OOXML, for instance, is seen as crucial by Microsoft as a means of maintaining its Office market share," The 451 Group, an analyst firm, said in a statement Thursday.
And as ZDnet blogger Mary Jo Foley noted, the ISO standards group is meeting in Geneva next week to vote on whether OOXML should be awarded official standard status.
Picnik, an online photo-editing service, has released specifications that will let other Web sites use its tools.
The Seattle company on Tuesday released its application programming interface, or API, called Picnik-in-a-Box. "Sites can use the Picnik interface to load, edit, and save specific images provided by users, customize certain portions of the Picnik interface, and give users a superior image-importing and -exporting experience for applications or Web sites," the company said in a statement.
Web site developers wishing to employ the feature can obtain a key from Picnik that grants access to the API, Picnik said.
Among sites using the API today are Photoextract.com, Fineartstudioonline.com, Freewebs.com, Box.net, Photoworks.com, ZoomShare.com, and Fliptrack.com Flickr and Lexmark both use a more elaborate, customized version, Picnik said.
Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems is working on its own online editing tool, Photoshop Express.
Kuler lets users create and rate color schemes.
(Credit: Adobe)I missed this tidbit while out on vacation earlier this month, but I figured there still might be some interest among folks who want to revamp their Web sites with an ever-changing palette of user-supplied color schemes: Adobe Systems has opened the interface to its Kuler service.
Kuler is a collection of more than 19,000 user-supplied and user-ranked color schemes, each combining five colors. Adobe has made RSS feeds available that cover the highest rated, most popular and newest schemes at the site.
"We're excited to see what you come up with, and we plan to feature the best applications in a Showcase Gallery on Adobe Labs," Adobe said in a blog entry.
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