Having heard of this new Flickr desktop client for Mac, flickery, I was going to try it out and see how well it fared compared to the FlickrShops, Photonics and other 1001s that already provide the same service. flickery looked pretty good: a simple interface, integrated search and access to all the normal flickr tools like uploading, creating photosets and commenting. Unfortunately the application, which is still only in public beta is not available anymore. The explanation?
A note on the developer’s blog says it all:
The nice guys from flickr.com just contacted me and told me they had to suspend my API key of flickery for now, because flickery is causing them too much traffic.
It’s a little surprising that an application which is still only in public beta could cause traffic problems in a website hosting billions of photos and getting easily thousands of uploads every day. Obviously though, developers wanting to use the Flickr API, which is available for non commercial use, have to abide to the terms of use, and given the explanation, flickery broke the following rule:
- Use Flickr APIs in a manner that adversely impacts the stability of Flickr.com servers or adversely impacts the behavior of other applications using the Flickr APIs.
Let’s hope this is only temporary and that Flickr will help out the developer find a way of making the application less strenuous on their servers so that we can enjoy the flickery desktop client once again.
