Recently, while backing up and “spring cleaning” my pc, I realized it was time to finally get my wedding photo film scans onto the web. I needed the web repository to be a place that could give me access to the original high-res files after uploading, so I turned to Flickr and signed up for a Pro account. At the same time, I knew that more of my friends who were at the wedding are on Facebook and that it would be a shame not to have the photos easily accessible and browsable through the photo friend tagging feature.
I was suprised that I couldn’t find a good Facebook application for this, particularly since there are already many photos tagged with the facebook:user=<id> machine tag in the public Flickr collection. So, I went ahead and built one for myself called Flickrbook. You can browse public photos from Flickr tagged with Facebook friends, link your own Flickr account and tag your own photos, and you can grant permission to your Facebook friends (including those without a Flickr account) to tag your public photos.
It was a nice little design and development exercise with the Facebook Platform- a chance for me to catch up on changes since I last worked with the platform as one of the 25 launch partners at the first F8 press conference. The platform is as stable as quicksand, but despite the grumblings of the developer community, they do seem to be making the changes for the best. I haven’t incorporated news feed publishing into Flickrbook yet, and a good thing, too- the new homepage design is forcing all developers to re-adjust their news story templates for the new stream, so I’ll spend some time with it before finalizing on a news feed and publisher design.
On top of that, it was also a nice little learning exercise with Google App Engine, which I used to develop and host the application. Having most recently worked with Amazon Web Services, I was impressed by the ease and speed of development afforded by the higher-level application and platform abstractions in App Engine. It’s not quite appropriate for all applications yet, though- the lack of asynchronous background processes and a binary data store being the two prominent holes in the platform. That being said, it’s perfect for Flickrbook and similar API mashup applications that are basically coordinating requests between platforms (in this case, between the Flickr and Facebook platforms).
If you’re a Flickr user, please do give Flickrbook a try and post your feedback below, I’d be interested in hearing what you think.
Tags: Flickrbook