Flickr Mashups
When Flickr was launched in early 2004, few would have expected that a little more than a year later it would not only have become one of the top photo-sharing sites on the Internet, but also have caught the eye of the Internet giant Yahoo!, which acquired Flickr and its parent company Ludicorp in March 2005.
Many things could be said to have contributed to Flickr’s enormous success: the intuitive user interface, the friendly tone of the text scattered about the site, the emphasis on the social aspects of building a web-based community, perhaps even just its being in the right place at the right time. One thing is clear — the decision to open up Flickr to the outside world was a smart one. Allowing developers to create applications that can fully interact with Flickr, storing and retrieving photos, together with all the other details stored alongside them, has spawned a whole secondary industry in Flickr-based applications. It seems that you can find practically everything out there — from tools to help you upload your photos to applications to turn your photostream into a bound and printed book. Everyone, from hobbyists to businesses, is getting in on the act.
The emergence of mashups as a means of building systems presents a whole new world of possibilities. No longer do you have to wait for a company to implement the features you know you need — you can just do it yourself. If Flickr doesn’t provide a way to automatically build sets of your most interesting photos, you don’t need to sit waiting in despair — you can go ahead and create the necessary functionality. Perhaps you want to geotag your photos, but Flickr’s maps don’t cover your local area very well? That’s not a problem — use the Flickr API to enable you to overlay your photos onto Google maps instead. If you don’t like Google Maps, take your own aerial photographs and use those! No matter how niche your requirements are, the fact that companies like Flickr are opening up their systems to outside developers means that you can supplement the services they provide to get just what you need, regardless of how bizarre or offbeat that need is.
Flickr is a great starting point for building mashups — a picture is worth a thousand words, and pictures are something Flickr has in abundance. You only have to visit Flickr fleetingly to realize that it is packed full of great photographs — pictures of pretty much everywhere in the world. From Antarctic survey stations to Brazilian rain forests, from New York skyscrapers to African desert scenes — with such an abundance of spectacular imagery, it is little wonder that people want to build new ways to explore and interact with this vast photographic database. Whatever it is you want to display, chances are you will find it on Flickr.
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