Flickmator

Published on February 20, 2011.

(Prefer Instagram to Flickr? Give the excellent Samrat Man Singh’s Instamator a try!)

It has been quite a long time I have not posted here, mainly because I do not have enough time and because I prefer quality posts over quickly written drafts.

However I take some time today to introduce Flickmator, a pretty simple web service I just launched. Its goal is to produce some normalized data feeds about your Flickr favorites, so as to allow you to make the most of them.

I coded it very quickly (see here) because I needed it. I indeed wanted to use my Flickr favorites (which grown up thanks to / because of Viewfinder) as both my iMac wallpaper and screen saver. Though some tools already exists, all those solutions feel quite “hacky” to me, from a client point of view. Let me elaborate on this idea.

Let’s imagine I own a thousand computers (and they are all OS X based, because I know it has a built-in support of RSS feeds has background wallpaper), and I want my Flickr favorites on their desktops. I would have to install a third party software on each of them, then configure it, many times. Continue imagining: I am happy with this solution for a few months. But the developer of the software I installed just published a new version which contains some bug fixes and stability improvements… What am I going to do? You get the idea.

Now do some generalization job: “I” is actually an unknown number of people round the world, and the Flickr favorites thing is any data consumption case.

My point is, I think services should offer many diversified ways to allow their users to deal with their data the way they want to. Firstly it would create a sound relation between the two sides and secondly it could encourage people to create incredible new side-products and create a pleasant ecosystem around the initial service ; which would be rather exciting don’t you think?