Saturday, July 15, 2006

The Beauty of Flickr (and Other Web 2.0 Apps)

Today on TechMeme, I ran across two new tools using Flickr:

FlickrInspector takes a Flick username, userid or email as input and returns more information than I would have thought possible. It displayed profile information, most recent photos, oldest photos, most interesting photos, tag cloud with some statistics, sets and searches for blogged photos.

Preloader allows you to edit your Flickr photos completely online with no additional software installed on your computer. It allows you to tweak brightness, contrast, hue, etc. along with rotation, flip, crop, and many others. I'm terrible with photo editing software, so here are a couple of screenshots from other blogs.

The beauty in this is not that there are two more tools that work with Flickr (even though these are two pretty cool ones!) The beauty is that web 2.0 applications, like Flickr and many, many others, are architected to make it easy for people to write new applications using the information and value in Flickr in a slightly different way. For example, FlickrInspector was written by Nils K. Windisch aka netomer from Germany in his spare time to improve the user experience of Flickr in a way that made sense to him, and after writing it, he shared it with the world to enhance the user experience of others. Flickr is a great example of the Architecture of Participation in use and harnessing the collective intelligence of your user base.

1 comment:

Josh Bancroft said...

I played with those this week, too. Awesome tools.

Preloadr struck me as the web-app version of Photoshop - it lets you do most of the stuff that you'd need to do to "tweak" your photos to get ready to post them.

I added it to my stable of web apps that I can turn to - Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Google Notebook, Google Calendar, etc.

There was a flash-based web version of PowerPoint I read about this week, but it didn't seem fully baked (no .ppt import/export). But it's only a matter of time before it comes.

See what I mean about being able to be equally productive on any computer, as long as I've got Firefox? ;-)