Web Services as a Strategy for Startups: Opening Up and Letting Go Stewart Butterfield, President, Ludicorp http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/6026 At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference San Diego, California, 15 March 2005 Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- We launched Flickr last year at this conference. It was a pretty different app then -- been ripped apart and reassembled a couple times. We have a significant announcement to make this year about Flickr again: the next person who asks me whether Flickr is getting bought is getting a punch in the nose. Flickr is a tool to help people share photos, join groups. The Squared Circle group has ~1500 people involved in cropping pix of circular objects to square frames to make trippy screensavers. Folksonomies -- what tags are hot on Flickr? There are 62 methods in the Flickr API. I don't have enough geek cred to help define APIs or Web Services, but these are atomic pieces of functionality that Flickr exposes to the world. We use the API in our own dev. E.g. flickr.photos.getUntagged is a hint of where we're going -- you can't do it through the website (yet) but you can do it through the API. You need to get an API key to do some of this stuff. -- We've gotten a lot out of the open API: * Trust: do you trust your data to someone else's service? Why put my photos there when I can keep them on my own server and know they're safe? API is a safeguard against us being bad * We've added features we wouldn't have done on our own * There's cred with the alpha geeks: very influential and good at getting the word out; when it's Xmas and someone gets a new digital camera, they're the ones getting asked what do do with their photos * Discipline: Makes us plan ahead further than we could have * Unleashing creativity: Gives people a greater sense of ownership when they can contribute, they buy into the process -- Downside: * We've lost control over the pace of when things happen * Have to deal with others' bugs * Some people are sloppy and their apps make API calls 500 times/sec * Privacy and copyright problems * Higher support costs * Business risks: things we were planning to do arise more quickly than they would have otherwise -- Some examples: * FlickrFox: a Firefox sidebar that shows photos from your contacts * Linux uploadr: not something we'd have done on our own early on, appeared a couple weeks after the API * Organizr: Drag and drop to create photos * MT plugin: Every MT rebuild updates the sidebar; more sophisticated version for WordPress * Flickr Postcard: Search for photos with a given tag, get an awesome display of the photos * Another downside: lots of devs spell Flickr wrong * Flickr World Map: A map of the planet with Flickr users' locations and Mapr, which tries to put photos on top of the map coordinates where they were shot -- Summary: * 250,000 API requests, peaks at 100/sec * 3,000,000 pageviews a day * Web services good * Web services for startups good, but scar -- Puts up fibonacci spiral made by auto-pulling images from the squared-circle group that is mindblowingly cool. Audience groans ecstatically -- see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3870716/in/set-104096/