Flock 1.0

In case you missed the news, Flock finally went 1.0 late last month. I've been playing around with Flock for over a year. They're integration with social services has gotten better and better. I did a clean install of it and setup my Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger accounts very easily. I've given up on using it for RSS, as having a server-based solution (Google Reader) is too valuable to me. They've also added Facebook and Twitter integration, two favorite services of mine. Both are well done. And of course it's based off Firefox 2.0 now, which is great. Most Firefox plugins work great with it. I'm using its blog writer right now, as I'm planning on using it as my primary for a week or so and then figure out if I should go back to Firefox or not.

Blogged with Flock

Lunch 2.0 Pics

Not only did I somehow wind up in some pics from Lunch 2.0 @ NetGear, somebody even tagged those pics with my name.

Web APIs: Flickr vs. GMaps

I was doing a little research on web APIs. Two of the better ones (or at least well known and used) out there are Flickr and Google's Map (GMap.) They present two very different ways to enable third party developers to leverage powerful web services. So I thought I'd do a little compare and contrast.

Flickr's API is a classic procedural library. There are calls for almost any action you could possibly do with all things Flickr : photos, account, tags, sets, etc. You can upload photos, access photo streams, search by tags ... pretty much anything you can do on Flickr's site. Each call is a different HTTP request. You can send the package of your request in a variety of formats: REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP. The REST and SOAP follow the usual patterns for these formats. The REST requests are "pure" HTTP requests. Flickr's XML-RPC is very true to the RPC mode. It uses simple XML to specify a procedure to call along with it's parameters.

You can also specify the format of the response you get back from Flickr. Since they support REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP for requests, it's not surprising they support all these for responses. They recently added JSON and PHP as response formats. I was pleased to see JSON. I can imagine that if I was going to use Flickr's API, I would probably choose to use REST+JSON. Make a pure HTTP request and get back a JavaScript object. Seems like the lean-mean approach to me. I was surprised to see PHP as a response type. In this case, they are referring to serialized PHP objects. The structure of these objects is identical to the JSON structures.

GMaps is different in many ways to Flickr. Instead of supporting procedural calls to Google, everything is object oriented JavaScript. You include a library from Google and then use their objects. Many of their objects provide methods for making calls similar to what you see in Flickr. For example, you can geo-code a location, calculate directions, etc. But you don't make the HTTP request and you don't parse a response. Google's JavaScript objects do these for you.

The differences in these web APIs reflect the differences in these web services. Flickr is more of a pure data service. You can modify data (photos) and query that data (search for photos, etc.) Flickr wants to be your photo database. As such, they give you a number of ways to access your data. What you do with the data is up to you. Show your pics on a website, provide tools for uploading, print the pics, make aprons, whatever...

GMaps wants to draw maps for you. They don't want to give you mapping data for you to do whatever for it. They want to draw. They'll take your data and draw maps with it. They always draw the map, so they give your users a familiar interface that also integrates into Google. All roads lead back to Google.

Thus the APIs to these services are very appropriate for the services. I don't know for sure, but I'd wager they also reflect the programming design behind the services. It seems pretty obvious that Flickr is written in PHP and that Google Maps is written in Java (maybe the last one is less obvious, but I do have a little inside information on that one.) So it's not really surprising that a PHP site would have a very flexible, procedural API, and that a Java site would have more closed, object-oriented API.

Digital Holidays

The holidays are over, but hopefully we all have fond memories from the time we spent with our friends and families. The modern spin on this is that it's really easy to digitize those memories now, in this day and age of digital photography. It's easy for everyone to take tons of digital pictures. No more running out of film, and you don't have to wait to get the photos developed. A lot of printers now support direct printing -- just plug in your camera once you're done snapping up shots of the kids opening their presents and print them out to mail them to grandma.

A company downstairs from my company, Presto, has an even easier way to share those digital pictures with grandma. Buy grandma a Presto/HP printer and she'll get a Presto email address. Send your pics to her and they'll print out on her HP printer automagically.

I like to download my pics to my computer still. I usually use Picasa and then upload the pics to Flickr. My friend Terry often has good tips on digital photography in his blog.

Note: This post is sponsored by HP.