CHAPTER 2 ?– UNCOVERING THE MASHUP POTENTIAL OF WEB SITES 28
Flickr: The Fundamentally Mashup-Friendly Site
Let??™s start our study of highly remixable web sites with Flickr, looking for features that make this
site amenable to mashups. In addition to many features for storing and sharing photos, Flickr is
chock-full of features that make it easy to mash up Flickr, not least of which is its use of XML,
XML web services, tagging, and Ajax. These features are blended in a surprisingly coherent,
comprehensive demonstration of how to knit this new technology together. You won??™t be
surprised then to read Flickr??™s own description of its goals at http://www.flickr.com/about:
To do this, we want to get photos into and out of the system in as many ways as we can:
from the web, from mobile devices, from the users??™ home computers and from whatever
software they are using to manage their photos. And we want to be able to push them
out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr web site, in RSS feeds, by e-mail, by posting
to outside blogs or ways we haven??™t thought of yet. What else are we going to use
those smart refrigerators for?
This flexibility of functionality makes Flickr a good web site to study when learning about
mashups. Flickr is made to be mashed up. You can see in one web site a great variety of mashupenabling
techniques??”and actually how they can be well integrated in one web site.
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