A friend of mine posed a question for which I don’t have an answer: Would Yahoo! have bought Flickr if the code that ran Flickr had been open source?
I’ve gone back and forth on this & frankly I don’t know. Usually a webservice has a huge barrier to entry based on the costs of bandwidth and hardware. This would keep little guys out. But, Yahoo! has competitors who have money, servers, and bandwidth that would make any start-up drool.
My friend ends his question with… “Well, Google (or other competitor) could just drop the code in, drop the price slightly, and go. What advantage does that give Yahoo! in this case?”
Sure, it’s tough being second, but it’s not like Google doesn’t have the means to wow people over. Heck, they could probably code it up in a week anyhow!
What say you? Would that have killed a deal?
Related link: http://dev.fooworks.com
In case you hadn’t noticed I really like the idea of tagging content.
In that vein I’m in the process of moving my regular weblog over to wordpress to take advantage of a nice little hack called tags4wp. It allows me to use tags for my posts vs categorizaion (which is a PITA and too much work to bother), as well as for post navigation.
Soon, we’ll hook up syncing with de.lirio.us, in the datalibre fashion of publishing once and reusing elsewhere.
Related link: http://de.lirio.us/
Version 0.10 of de.lirio.us is complete.
The keyword mantra for what we’ve done so far has been “simple, simple, simple”. It’s like the age old adage of business people in meat-space: “location, location, location”.
What does 0.01 look like (without you going to peak yourself)?: bookmark tagging, rss everywhere, a currently popular tags list, but we’ve also added search and importantly private bookmarks. To me these are the five holy-grail ingredients.
On the eve of 10,000 bookmarks there is a transition to be made. While the features are the solid five in simplicity the UI isn’t yet a vision of zen-like beauty. While we have begun to make the service a bit more flowery for those visiting… visual design is no substitute for replacing dreadful navigation with ease of use for you techies -and- your mom.
The plan? We want to 37Signals that bad boy, make a study of Flickr’s UI, become one with basecamp’s ease of use. I bow humbly in Flickr & 37Signal’s general direction.
Going forward, 37Signals and Flickr are verbs.
As a webservice that’s open to input I value what you have to say, and code you’d like to contribute. If 37Signals and Flickr are verbs for you too by all means join in. With input we’ll mold de.lirio.us into something you -and- your mom can talk about.
