Last week I used Flickr for the first time (obviously I follow the trends rather than make them).
What a design!…fast, easy, imparting a brimming sense of possibilities while remaining clear and directed. Really, it’s delicious.
So being a partisan I immediately wondered why it wasn’t done in Flash. Apparently, it was, originally. Here’s an interview with the lead developer.
Flickr began as a UI for IMing that included photosharing. Since the emphasis was on providing a visual context (dragging and dropping, windows, avatars?) for instant communication, Flash seemed like the natural choice.
However, after the photosharing aspect caught fire, the Flickr team responded quickly, dropping Flash and creating the site as it is, which allows users to build photo journals that other users can view anytime, “asynchronously,” as the techno-literate say.
So Flash was no longer necessary, and, to boot, had two flaws 1) security and 2) USERS COULD NOT LINK TO POINTS OF INTEREST IN THE SITE (so, for instance, they could not email friends to point them to photos of their vacation that they had just posted).
After absorbing this anxiety-producing point, I decided to provide URLS for each part of my coming playground site. (And learn Flash Vars, so the site can handle homing-in URLs).
I want to to be talked about, don’t you? Isn’t that the ages-old vanity behind this new-fangled thing, Web 2.0, social networking, viral marketing, community-building, whatever the latest catchphrase is?
