Future of Web Apps: Flickr

Cal Henderson – Flickr

10 reasons to love web2.0

Flickr – Awsome
Web2.0 – kinda awesome
Birthday – in SanFran on Friday. they’re 2

Passionate users are important…they care about building Flickr – gets people to like it. They need to get people to care about it by caring themselves.

Difference btw what users want and what they need. Watch the doing not jus the saying. Undersntad the bahaviour

Collaboration: the first incarnation was an online game…Flickr was built on the same tech, with social network idea was there There’s incentive to get your friends to sign up to share. Collaborative tagging means that you can add your tags to friends photos. Let’s the organsied people in your network gives you value (with less effort)

Aggregation: shows the latest; combines things; latst photos from your contacts. You can slice by tags, by geotag, interestingness etc. Create different views

Open APIS: we always mean web services APIs. Created APIs for them selves and then let other people to use it. Otehr people can build your interfaces…allows people to build great aps around FLickr etc. Increases creativity. Allows cool aps. Allows the edge cases. If you don’t provide the API, people are going to do it anyway – but in a way that hurts you more

Clean URLS: expose the logical structure? USe Mod_Rewrite in apache. Does not have to point to anythng on a server…the server can translate from URL to a file name – keep things simple. Make them guessable. Design in from the beginning. You may need to scale – how do you do it if URLS designed badly

AJAX: worst name for a technology ever. It could really just be called A. Not really about XML, or JS, it’s about A in any format. Need a strong API to leverage this in the best way. USed to streamline the interactions they had on Flickr – reducing page reloads. Keeps context etc.

Unicode: (features a picture of the Rosetta stone). Internationlisation comes first, localisation comes later. Think glbal from the beginning.

Desktop Integration: RSS etc. Different desktop apps work with Flickr, eg to upload photos. Use APIs, get round things that suck on web Browser and otehr platform integrations can also help, improve the user experience. Integrate with email – commonest app for people to use. Easy mechanism for people to use. On mobile as well. (‘Flickr private machnaism is stupid and they should not have had it’) Use the esixitng structures

Mobile: there are some standards and sometimes people use them. The browsing experience will always be poor – too small a screen. It;s not just a case of re-presenting the content -it’s thinking about how to present the content in a different way.

Open data: Import and export.let people leave – give access for people to control their data and get it out. Not just the photos they’ve uploaded, but all the metadata that has been added to the photo on the web. ANd people have built on this as well to improve the service.

Open Content: some companies ‘own’ the data you upload. Flickr states that it still belongs to the user. They can control the usage. (well, try to) CC Licence being pushed.

http://iamcal.com/talks

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