Because every silver lining has a cloud. Or something.
“Ten reasons to love Web 2.0″
- Flickr is awesome! It certainly is…
- Web 2.0 – kinda awesome…
- Flickr 2.0 is 2 years old on Tuesday!
- About 2 million users – many passionate ones
- The developers are passionate about what they do
- Passionate developers make for passionate users
- User wants vs user needs (recurring theme here…)
- Don’t listen to your users – they say what they want but don’t really want them
- Give them what they need and they’re more likely to be passionate
10 things:
1. Collaboration.
- Flickr used to be a MMORPG, but became MMOPS (Massively Multiplayer Online Photo Sharing)
- Putting photos on web sites isn’t new
- The social network sharing is, though
- Collaborative metadata
- Add tags to my own photos, but also to my friends’
2. Aggregation
- Slice the data in interesting ways
- latest photos from everyone, from your contacts etc.
- slice by tag, geo-location, “interestingness”
3. Open APIs
- web services APIs – SOAP, REST, XML-RPC etc.
- What’s the point? They needed it for Ajax-based apps. Eating. Own. Dogfood
- Do read-only stuff first: RSS etc
- Do read-write later – provide API and data-storage, let others build the UI. E.g. Fastr – a game.
- If you don’t provide an API and people want your stuff, people will screen-scrape instead.
4. Clean URLs
- No need to expose the guts of the app anymore
- Expose the logical structure from the POV of the user
- mod_rewrite under Apache is the easiest way (maybe…)
- URL hacking is an alpha-geek thing to do, but people do it.
- They mustn’t change. If a URL links to a resource now, it should link to it forever.
5. Ajax
- “remote scripting” / “remoting”
- Could really be called ‘A’, as it’s not necessarily about XML or even JavaScript, just asynchronous requests.
- All of the Ajax on Flickr uses the Flickr web service APIs
6. Unicode
- i18n – comes first, l10n comes later
7. Desktop integration
- All happens through the APIs
- Not just desktop apps, browser apps too e.g. bookmarklets
- Interaction via e-mail – great for uploading from mobile phones
8. Mobile
- “next year – the year of the mobile” – said every year since year dot
- Modern phones use decent browsers though, which supports XHTML-MP 1.0
- Still limited by small screen size, so rethink the content and the interface, not just re-present the same content as the desktop browser site
- Still limited by small screen size, so rethink the content and the interface, not just re-present the same content as the desktop browser site
9. Open data
- Import and export of data
- RSS gives me the latest 10, say, but doesn’t provide access to the entire dataset
- The API lets them do this
- The more you make it easy for people to leave, the more they’re inclined to stay
10. Open content
- The data is owned by the user, not by the service provider
- Various Creative Commons licenses can be applied to define how other may use your stuff