Cal Henderson – Building Flickr

“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