I just watched the video about Photophlow and I am seriously blown away by that interface. It’s beautiful, and active and interesting and exciting. And kinda scary.
This is a pretty cool side-effect of open APIs - anyone can come along and design a way better interface for your product. It presents a great opportunity for designers with innovative ideas to actually build working products on top of established content sources. But what does it say about the designers who actually have control over how the original content is presented? Does it kind of minimize the need for good designers at places like Yahoo, because someone else is probably going come along and design a better interface in half the time anyway? I guess it’s a question for engineers, too…if some kid is going to build a Facebook app in his basement with your API for free, then do you really need an engineer to do it?
January 11th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Definitely a trend. Twitter, for example, receives a lot more posts from third party interfaces than their own. It’s a good thing in my opinion. There should be multiple ways to interact with your favorite web apps. The new interfaces complement the destination sites.
Sarah, if you’d like an invite to Photophlow, I’ve got a few left.
January 11th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Yeah - I guess in the long run, it might mean mo’better design and mo’better work for designers, plus lots more content generated for the source sites.
Just spent a little while playing around in Photophlow (thanks for the invite)…amazing…love it. I now have 3 invitations if anyone’s interested…
January 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am
hi. i’m the designer of photophlow.
i really appreciate the encouraging words, and would like to offer some perspective on the original post.
first of all, flickr has a beautiful, efficient, brilliant design. i think that flickr is the best designed content site on the web.
photophlow is not meant as an alternative interface to flickr, it is meant as a complementary interface. where flickr is brilliantly asynchronous, photophlow aims to be more synchronous.
we rely heavily on flickr’s content, but also flickr’s design. for instance, when you leave a comment on a flickr photo from photophlow, a link back to the room the comment was made in is added to the comment so the photographer and others can join in the conversation. we also have photophlow badges that are designed around the dimensions of flickr profiles. we’ve also patterned some of our design choices around aspects of the flickr design, so that flickr users can feel a bit more at home in our search UI, for example.
that said, photophlow has a very different design from flickr in many respects… but if photophlow was *better* than the flickr interface [and it isn’t] the site would eat itself. instead, we rely heavily on an understanding of flickr’s structure and design to best integrate our service with it in as mutually beneficial a way as possible.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I definitely see the symbiotic relationship that Flickr and Photophlow have - just being in the room for half an hour or so, I gained a new Flickr contact, someone favorited one of my photos, and I added some tags to some photos that didn’t have any. Photophlow’s rich interface can actually be a huge driver of content, relationships and interactions on Flickr itself. And, of course, you make a good point about the site eating itself. In an extreme case where someone built a para-site with a killer interface that was meant to replace Flickr, the potential demise of Flickr would also mean the potential demise of the …uhm, para-site :-)
(Or would it? Does Photophlow steal pageviews from Flickr?)
But back to the design question - as much as I love the design of Flickr, I’d say that Photophlow is much more experimental and as a designer, it’s really exciting to see. And, it’s my hope (and general observation) that each new crack at designing a better interface to say, view products on ebay, or rentals on Craigslist, or videos on YouTube, is sort of fresh, new and experimental. And the question still remains on whether or not this changes the focus of design at places like Yahoo. If they are the platform of the content, do they invest their time creating experimental designs or do they focus on designing great tools for third-parties come along and build cool interfaces for them? Then again, maybe it’s kind of obvious…Yahoo builds an interface that’s usable for a broad audience and leave the experimental stuff to third parties. And then the experimental stuff eventally is no longer experimental, at which point Yahoo adopts it.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I’ll take one of those invites, Sarah, if you have any left.
The article in cnet ends by saying that maybe Flickr is getting the hint because they’ve advertising for a senior ui designer, but maybe they’re just trying to replace a fabulous designer who recently left?
Does Flickr show ads to non-pro users? I suppose that’s where a loss of page views might hurt. I know striatic has been a mainstay of the site as long as I can remember and his desire to be complementary and symbiotic rather than parasitic rings true.
I know Craiglist fights against people scraping their content (and displaying ads) but have also acquiesced to various map mashups and of course they sport RSS feeds, which while not a full API still has the tendency to permit content to flow into other formats.
It does seem that the future of the web involves the free mixing of data and less control by the originators, designer, creators, and owners.
January 12th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
regarding “stealing pageviews” - we do allow people to view flickr photos without viewing flickr photopages, but flickr doesn’t serve ads on photopages.
flickr does show ads on search pages [if you’re not using a pro account] so in that sense we might steal some page views. however, we’ve had people mention that they’re more interested in flickr than before due to trying out photophlow, and there are a lot of links into flickr from our site, so i think we give back to flickr more than we take.
i think that its is difficult for flickr to add services like photophlow to its main site because we’d be somewhat distracting from the core purpose of the site. being a third party service allows us to do some things that might be difficult for flickr as well - twitter integration and IM integration beyond just yahoo IM, for example.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Side effect? The way I see it, that’s the whole purpose.
It’s how much of the consulting market works. A vendor releases a product with an API and a developer learns that API in and out creating useful add ons and utilities. Then the developer either starts their own company marketing their wares and talent, gets hired as a consultant to develop apps for clients, or gets hired by the vendor.
This way the company that publishes the API can essentially outsource the refinement of their applications without the R&D investment. They can just buy the company or hire the developer.