"We built the system to stay within the limits of 3600 calls per hour, however it seems that a surge of imports pushed it over the threshold before we could throttle it back."

It sounds like they designed it to stay within the rate limits, but had a bug, so it didn't.

"We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit."

Is it crazy to think that Flickr abides by the rate limiting they advertise? Isn't that just like "truth in advertising"? The onus is on you to stay within that rate.

"We thought about creating a new api key but didn’t know if that would be flagged as abuse."

Is there really any part of your gut that says no? Do you think Flickr would implement a rate limiting policy if they were okay with people creating an unlimited number of keys so that it serves no point?

Sorry to be so negative, but... Is this really news?

michaeldwan, why are you posting techcrunch linkbait here? Since you were quoted as saying that you know your exporter went over the API limit, this seems like non-news. It's unlikely that you were even blocked by a human.

EDIT: it's pretty disappointing to see a YC partner jumping on the linkbait bandwagon: http://twitter.com/garrytan/status/167050449747312640

Seems like this kind of an article will get the whole thing more attention and increase the user uptake of this offer.

This whole thing says to me:

* We're willing to spread rumors about our competitors, and rip off their IP

* We're willing to manufacture controversy to play the victim when there's no actual controversy

* We will use every media channel we can to amplify fake controversy to get more eyeballs

* Our service doesn't actually work; we DOS'd our competitor until it broke

I won't be moving my photos there.

I haven't read a whole lot on this - could you clarify on the ripping off of IP?

edit: I should have read the whole comment thread first - nevermind.

"We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit. "

YCombinator founders are developing a reputation for weasel-word bullshit. Ditch the victim act.

Why read malice when it could just be naïveté?

Maybe they really didn't think Flickr didn't have automatic systems to throttle you once you exceeded your API limit.

Maybe they really thought it'd take hours, maybe even days before someone at Flickr noticed the spike and manually triggered a block.

Maybe that's the level of competency and foresight one should expect out of Snapjoy...

Even taken at face value, their own words make them look bad.

It's not unreasonable to think that companies would warn you before cutting off your API key. Any time I've ever integrated with a 3rd party API and come close to reaching their limit I've gotten friendly emails from devs asking if they can be of assistance.

That's kind of hit or miss.

I wouldn't be surprised if a small or new company emailed me about nearing the API limit. They're trying to build a relationship.

But a Fortune 500 like Yahoo or Google? They couldn't care less about someone trying to use their free API. You're just one of thousands to them.

It's easily automated. It's still a nice thing to do for your users. Also just because you're a fortune 500 doesn't mean you shouldn't take steps to build relationships with your users. The same attitude works in reverse. You have freedom of choice with the service you use.

I think the email is the first part of building the relationship. Sure the first email is automated, but you can't call it building a relationship unless there's a real human being on that end trying to understand what's going wrong.

Agreed. Trying to pass automated emails as personal never works. It is, however, a step in the right direction. Knowing that a dev is looking after the API users is somewhat comforting.

> Any time I've ever integrated with a 3rd party API and come close to reaching their limit I've gotten friendly emails from devs asking if they can be of assistance.

They didn't "come close", they blew through it in what sounds like minutes.

250,000 photos downloaded in 2 hours, according to http://www.flickraft.com/. 100x the API limit!

What TechCrunch fails to mention in its linkbaity headline is that it was blocked for exceeding the API limit calls of 3600/hr and was therefore blocked. I do not see how this is news at all. Most likely the article was written just to portray Flickr/Yahoo as a company that "banned" Snapjoy from its services.

At the very least, the name of the tool is trademark infringement and the derivative logo is copyright infringement.

If the main goal behind the suspension was user retention rather than just bypassing the API limits, whoever made the decision chose poorly. Flickr users who find out about this will know that it will be difficult to get their photos out if they decide to use something else in the future, so they have a greater incentive to seek alternatives beforehand.

The name of the tool is Flick Raft, two words.

Logos are typically tried under trademark, not copyright protection.

This is a good thing for Flicr because trying to claim that having two colors in your logo highlighting the text is something unique to your logo wouldn't make a very good fight in the copyright court.

C'mon. The logo on the page was the Flickr logo with "aft" appended. If you made a drink in a red can with the Coca-Cola logo plus a couple extra letters on the end you'd get legitimately sued into oblivion too.

> If I created a drink called Coca-Colada, I'd probably have a legitimate grievance if someone claimed I was ripping off Coca-Cola.

Not if you used their logo verbatim in yours. Look at the screenshot TechCrunch features: http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/flickraf...

> Or how about a bowl to wash off coca plants, marketed as a Coca Collander? Are they still going to sue me into oblivion?

Again, if you used their logo, probably. A collander isn't in direct competition with a soft drink, though, so it's a pretty poor analogy.

That isn't the Flickr logo verbatim.

Artistically---its not even the same font, nor the same colors (not all blues and light pinks are created equal).

It's apparent just by glancing at it that its not the same thing. Any argument that it'll create confusion in the marketplace is null. Even the nature of the service further differenciates FlickRaft from Flickr.

Did you really look at FlickRaft, and think "gracious, Flickr want's me to move from their servers to Snapjoy!"

Do you think anyone ever could?

If there's no problem there, then there's no trademark violation. All that's left is calling this a copyright issue.

However with a word logo, there's only 4 points to its artwork:

1. The actual words (Different in the case of FlickRaft)

2. The font (also different)

3. The color combination (reminiscent but actually different)

4. The pattern (there's just two colors, a protectable pattern this does not make).

Even with a completely original logo, Coca-Colada would be a clear violation of trademark law. Similar names within the same industry will generally be deemed to cause confusion, which is what trademark law intends to prevent.

Your first point is silly, so I'll skip it.

Logos are protected by both trademark and copyright in many cases. Judging a work to be too trivial for copyright is a job for an actual lawyer.

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#title

It is definitely not a parody. It's a feature of a competing product.

I gave Snapjoy a try because of the HN link. It seemed to work fine. The pricing doesn't seem feasible for my uses and this kind of wink-wink behavior doesn't at all boost my opinion. See HN discussion about Path's "oops, our bad" thing.

Their stuff didn't work? Flickr's worked exactly as it was described to. Obviously this is a huge PR piece, but it doesn't really make me want them over Flickr.

1) That's certainly lame on the part of Flickr.

2) I find it odd that Snapjoy is offering this at a time it isn't accepting new accounts: I clicked "sign up" and entered an e-mail address to be notified about when they're expanding.

3) I hadn't heard of Snapjoy before this story.

Suspending an API key after that user exceeds a published rate limit sounds perfectly reasonable. We have no reason to believe it wasn't automated and temporary, yet. That's not "lame".

The limit was 3600 API calls per hour. They moved 125,000 photos per hour. I don't know how many calls that involves, but it appears well over the limit.

You can pull up to 500 photos per flickr API call, so it's possible to fetch up to 180,000 photos per hour while staying under the limit.

Why is it lame on Flickr's part to ban/suspend an API key exceeding the requests limit? I can entirely believe that this was automated.