Live Blogging The Future of Web Apps
part II
10 Reasons to Love Web 2.0
From a web site to a web application.
Cal Henderson
Flickr
- 2.0 is just a name for a bunch of things that have been around for a while.
- Flickr has a lot of passionate user, and so are the developers. Care about it.
- A difference between what people want and what people need. (Second mention today.) don't listen to what they say they want. Watch what people do to understand what they need. Give them what they need and that will make them passionate.
- Collaboration: We built a social network. The photo-sharing product, to some extent, was no big deal. What was a big deal was the social networking effect. Incentive for people to join the network. People were encouraged to sign up. Collaborative metadata was also an interesting benefit that people recognized. Default settings encouraged collaboration.
- Aggregation: Shows latest stuff. Loads of interesting slices of data shown in new ways. Tags, time, geolocation, location to other track tags, interestingness. Not just about smooshing together in a chron order.
- Open APIs: Web services APIs, SOAP, REST, for example. What's the point? They needed it for Ajax for calls. Later, it was clear that other people would use it. Read-only (RSS or custom XML) APIs, first. Beyond, RPC/SOAP, etc, people can build off of them. Storage and process from Flickr, build from others. Stuff that we couldn't have thought of. Most recent example: Game: Fastr. Multiplayer game. Figure out what tag it comes from.
- Clean URLs: No reason to expose the guts anymore. (Second mention today.) Logocal structure. People get it. URLs should never change. They should always point to the same place. Take scaleability into account from the start.
- AJAX: Possibly the worst name ever. Been around for a while. Could be A. Asynchronous. Does not have to be about Javascript. Or about XML. On Flickr, we use AJAX to streamlinesinteractions that we already have. It reduces pageloads.
- Unicode: From Wikipedia: An industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. Flickr uses UTF8.
- Desktop Integration: Everything doesn't have to be in the browser. All API-based. Even RSS feeds, which are simply read-only APIs. Flickr examples: multi-file uploaders. Also integrated with email. People don't always think about integrating services into email. This is true for mobile, as well. Most mobile devices can email, for example, so this worked for us. Used email for asynchronous communicatioins Says: Don't rebuild applications that people already have.
- Mobile: Every year, people say this is the year. Well? Where is it? WAP sure didn't change our lives. Building content for mobile is not about using the same stuff for the web on a phone. Making consumable chunks of data, rather than serving loads of data. Think in much smaller chunks.
- Open Data: import/export of data from systems we build. Provide ways for people to get things in and out. By giving the opportunity to escape, they stay. They don't feel trapped.
- Open Content: Previously, once you upload content, the company owns it. This true of many photo sites. Not on Flickr. Creators own thir content and can use a CC licence andcopyright. we can allow people to reuse and remix conent.
See blog.flickr.com for more.
Presentation: http://iamcal.com/talks
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
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