Boing Boing: ETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy for Startups

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

ETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy for Startups

Flickr's Stewart Butterfield just delivered a fantastic talk called Web Services as a Strategy for Startups: Opening Up and Letting Go, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It was a guided tour of the lessons learned from the exhaustive and powerful Flickr API, which has attracted tons of innovative development. Here are my notes from the talk:

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

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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