Flickr was one of the first APIs that I profiled back in 2010 when I started API Evangelist. Using their API as a cornerstone of my research, resulting in their API making it into my history of APIs storytelling, continuing to be a story I’ve retold hundreds of times in the conversations I’ve had over the eight years of being the API Evangelist. Now, after the second (more because of Yahoo?) acquisition, Flickr users are facing significant changes regarding the number of images we can store on the platform, and what we will be charged for using the platform — forcing me to step back and take another look at the platform that I feel has helped significantly shape the API space as we know it.
When I step back and think about Flickr, it’s most important contribution to the world of APIs was all about the resources it made available. Flickr was the original image sharing API, powering the growing blogosphere at the beginning of this century. Flickr gave us a simple interface for humans in 2004, and an API for other applications just six months later, that provided us all with a place to upload the images we would be using across our storytelling on our blogs. Providing the API resources that we would be needed to power the next decade of storytelling via our blogs, but also set into the motion the social evolution of the web, demonstrating that images were an essential building block of doing business on the web, and in just a couple of years, on the new mobile devices that would become ubiquitous in our lives. https://goo.gl/4KbbwK
