Thing 22: Mashups and Flickr

I browsed thru some of the flickr mashup and add-on apps. Again, I must say I'm impressed with what all is available. THe great thing is that these can grow as the sophistication of the user base grows.




Anyway, for a simple flicr app, I looked at Spell with Flickr. This is a little tool created by someone outside of Flickr, using Flickr photos of letters. You just type a word/phrase and it pulls the letters to give you back your word or phrase in a cool mosiac. Most ingenious, I thought. If you don't like a particular letter you just click it to get another version of the same letter. My only complaint is that given the code provided (html or js), your site has to link back to flickr to get your mosiac'ed word. i guess it would be violating copyright ?? if one made local copies of the letter jpg files and stored/referenced them on one's own server... for dialup users to your site or blog, i'd imagine the calls to flickr for those image files could slow things down a bit.

Another mashup I liked is Pictobrowser, which lets you put a slideshow widget for your flickr photos on your blog. not just a link, but an actual slide show. that's nice.

i also looked at flickReplacr, but that was a dud. the idea was to take any two words and replace them with a photo from flickr. the hits i got back were too strange and unreliable for me to pursue this one further.

one could definitely spend all day playing with these things!