FlickrFan: Dave Winer's New Photo Viewing Software
Long-time inventor Dave Winer has released an early version of his new Mac software called FlickrFan tonight. Though there are some kinks in it at launch, the service leverages a number of APIs to do some very cool things.
Context & Ripple Effects
FlickrFan is the latest entry in Dave Winer's 2007 run of small, API-stitched tools — he launched TwitterGram that July, combining Twitter's API with audio uploads, and has long argued for a 'River of News' flow over folder-based reading. The new Mac app applies that river logic to photos, pulling Flickr streams into a continuously cycling viewer that syndicated write-ups describe as a Flickr-powered screensaver aimed at the living-room TV.
First-order effects
- Mac users get an early, admittedly kinked viewer that turns Flickr and other API feeds into ambient background displays, extending Flickr beyond the browser at zero cost to Yahoo.
- Winer adds another proof point to his thesis that single-purpose clients assembled from open APIs can ship faster than platform-native features.
Second-order effects
- Flickr's API ecosystem keeps compounding: after third-party editors like Preloadr in 2006 and the Picnik partnership announced in October 2007, independent viewers like FlickrFan now distribute Flickr content onto desktops and TVs Yahoo doesn't have to build for.
- Content providers — news outlets among them, given Winer's recent long bet with NYT's Martin Nisenholtz over web rankings — gain a new surface to compete for: the idle big-screen in the living room.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, photo services compete to be default feeds inside whatever client owns the screen, shifting value from destination sites toward whoever controls the viewing layer — and making API access terms the real battleground between platforms and the developers building on them.
The trend: Consumer photo software is drifting from destination websites toward ambient, API-fed surfaces on every screen in the house, with independent developers assembling the clients platforms haven't built yet.