Live Notes from The Future of Web Apps Summit Flickr - Awesome, and almost 2 years old now Passionate developers create passionate users. You have to care about the things you're building. What users want and what they need are different. Many things Flickr built are not what people would have said they wanted. Ten things 1. Collaboration. Flickr started as a MM Online Game. Massively Multiplayer Online Photo Network. They kept 'friends' and removed 'enemies' feature :-) Social network from the ground up. Incentivise adding people to the network. Collaborative Metadata - adding tags to own photos but also to friends' photos. Idea of a family working together to annotate pictures that a family representative has uploaded. 2. Aggregation. Latest photos from everyone, different slices in different ways, tags, location, Interestingness algorithm (activity around photo) 3. Open APIs. Web services API. Flickr needed it for AJAX-based apps, internal use intially, then opened up later. First stage to do read-only (feeds etc) - lots of value in this alone. Beyond this RPC-type APIs turn into web services where others build interfaces onto the data. This has led to things being built that the developers would never have built. Example of multiplayer game Fastr based on tagging photos. Without an API people will still do this sort of stuff, but they'll scrape etc and it's hard to protect against the downsides of this. Bandwidth hits etc. 4. Clean APIs. Expose logical structure, not the internal workings. MOD_rewrite under Apache. Guessable URLS, and immutable: They must never change! Even when you change system you have to support old URLs too. 5. AJAX. Not necessarily JavaScript or XML.. about the Asyncronous part primarily. XMLHTTPRequest and an API to call. Strong API to expose all needed functionality is required. Used on Flickr to streamline interaction, remove page-loads, save some bandwidth, retain state and context. Also for creating whole new experiences - self-contained applications. 6. Unicode. Internationalisation (building in the functionality) and localisation (translation of relevant parts of app and data). Build in support from the beginnning, using Unicode. UTF8. 7. Desktop/Platform Integration. How can we pull interactions out into other regular apps. All based on APIs. Early on build Mac/Windows uploader apps to overcome limitations of web for doing this. Also browser apps such as bookmarklets, XUL for Mozilla, Avalon for Windows. Integration with email. People already have and understand it, simple mechanism for getting pictures into Flickr (inc mobile users), and notifications out of Flickr to email. 8. Mobile. Will one day become a more important platform.. and they still keep saying it. Simple markup standards XHTML Mobile Profile 1.0. Small apps for mobile devices which will work on majority of modern devices. Building content for mobile is different, not just skinning. Build specially for the constraints of the devices, and the context of use. 9. Open Data. RSS is useful but not a mechanism for getting all of data in and out of system. Easy escape routes are an incentive to stay. Users own their data, and the metadata that happens around them. Allowed through read/write APIs. Also a source of interesting third-party apps - eg export to DVD. 10. Open Content. Prior to Flickr web apps which stored metadata would pretty much own the data you upload. Flickr is different, and they can't do anything to/with the data without your permission. Additionally Creative Commons licences can be applied, leads to very interesting and fun reuses. All pics in presentation were CC from Flickr Slides at http://iamcal.com/talks
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