I’ve been playing around with a new photo-sharing site called Flickr. It started as an offshoot of an online game (Game Neverending), but it’s quickly becoming the poster child for what people are calling "Web 2.0."
The Power of the Tag
The most revolutionary thing about Flickr isn't the photos-it's the way they’re organized. Instead of putting photos into a single "folder" or "album," you assign them multiple "tags."
A photo of a sunset in San Francisco can be tagged with sunset, San Francisco, and Golden Gate. This creates a flat, non-hierarchical structure that users are calling a "folksonomy." It makes discovery incredibly powerful. You can click on a tag and see everyone else's photos with that same tag.
AJAX and Real-time
The site also makes heavy use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). You can edit a photo's title or add a tag without the whole page reloading. It feels more like a desktop application than a website.
// A conceptual look at the 'magic' of AJAX on Flickr
function updateTitle(photoId, newTitle) {
xmlhttp.open("POST", "/api/update_title", true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
document.getElementById("title-display").innerHTML = newTitle;
}
};
xmlhttp.send("id=" + photoId + "&title=" + newTitle);
}
Outlook
Flickr is proving that the web can be social, interactive, and highly searchable. The "tagging" model is going to spread to everything-bookmarks (del.icio.us), blog posts, and eventually even our local files. We’re moving away from the rigid structures of the past and into a world of messy, user-defined data. It’s chaotic, but it works.
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