My 3-year-old daughter looked at 270,000-odd pictures of pumpkins yesterday.
Well, not all 270,000, but as many as a hyper preschooler is able in the span of an half hour while pushing the “next photo” button repeatedly and announcing each new pumpkin at the top of her lungs.
Followed, of course, by most of 320,000 pictures of balloons — another topic in her Top 50 — and as many squirrels as she could fit in before it was time to get a bath.
It is doubtful that Flickr’s developers envisioned the use of its search and slideshow functions as the truly exceptional preschooler entertainment system they in fact are. Luckily for your correspondent, the interface they provided just happened to fit all the requirements for this particular activity.
Most of us cannot rely on our user interface fitting every possible need, and we certainly shouldn’t try to make it do so: that way lies madness (and an interface that doesn’t actually work particularly well for much of anything). Instead, the web has begun learning what software engineers have understood in other domains for decades, since the first grep crawled out of the filesystem muck and into a waiting pipe. That is: programmer interface is king. Build the mechanism, sit back and let others use it for their own nefarious ends, and beautiful compositions will be formed which one could never have foreseen.
Twitter is used 10x more via its API than through its web site. 10x. That speaks for itself, donchathink?
Jectiv’s API is perhaps its single most important aspect — and the one we strove to get right first. We don’t know how people are going to want to use this thing, and that’s quite honestly one of the most exciting parts of the whole exercise. But we’re doing our best to make sure that whatever people do want to do, there are decent odds they’ll be able to try. If we were building something for which we could anticipate and provide for every likely use, then we’d be building something pretty limited, and really where’s the fun in that?
Web sites in isolation can still be quite useful. But if you want to be part of whatever the smeg it is that the web is becoming, you need to provide a shiny plug for it to hook itself into. Otherwise you’re just a curiosity.