Photo Web Links

The power of Flickr isn’t the fact that they offer disk space for image hosting; the power of Flickr is the community. By providing power searching and grouping tools, folks can easily find photos of interest. When they view photos, members can easily leave a comment or mark a photo as a “favorite.” Flickr has built up a strong brand and reputation as the community image sharing site.

Flickr is owned by Yahoo and run on a proprietary codebase that (despite a robust API) is closed to the outside world. The fate of Flickr is in Yahoo’s hands. When Yahoo lays off a bunch of key Flickr employees, one can’t help but wonder if there might be solutions with more options for long-term sustainability.

Image hosting happens everywhere. It’s the community that holds the value. What if there were a distributed way to handle photo community features (comments, favorites, feeds, etc) built on open protocols and the open stack?

Identity throughout the system (image “owners”, commenter identity, etc) would be provided by OpenID. Images would need to have metadata to identify an owner, and a way to specify tags consistently for cross-site search. Where would the comments live? A distributed hosting service that could associate comments by an image identifier and a commenter identifier? Presumably, “favorite” lists could be kept in the same fashion. RSS or Atom feeds throughout could allow for tracking/notification of users, photos, tags, and the like.

I’m not the first one to muse about such things. A search revealed a few folks who have mentioned similar ideas (sometimes called distributed Flickr) in a blog comment or as part of a microblog post. It doesn’t appear that there has been any real effort to develop specifications or identify specific technologies that could enable such a system. Would this fall into the realm of the DiSo folks?

There are lots of ideas and lots of questions. Let’s talk about it.

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