Even a scrappy little startup company can benefit by taking the risk of exposing its APIs to the remix culture and a loyal development community. Stewart Butterfield, President and Founder of Ludicorp, discusses not only his company's collaboration platform for photos, Flickr, but also an overview of the business decisions, goals, and architecture required in the design, implementation, and management of the Flickr API.

Starting with the thirty second overview of Flickr, Stewart describes the Flickr mission, which simply put is two fold: one, help people share their photos with their friends and family with easy and flexible methods, and two, innovate new ways of organizing photos. Stewart continues with brief descriptions of the applications that the Flickr team and the development community have implemented extending Flickr in interesting and innovative ways. These demonstrations include the following applications: FlickFox, Linux uploader, Organizr, Movable Type Flickr plug-in, WordPress Flickr plug-in, Flickr Postcard, and Flickr Worldmap.

Mr. Butterfield ends his presentation with a brief discussion about the pros, cons, and trepidations of releasing the Flickr API to creative developers. Some impressive statistics about the demand for the Flickr API were presented at the end of the presentation.

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Stewart Butterfield, President and Founder of Ludicorp, is a successful entrepreneur who is widely recognized as a leader in online development and user interaction design. Recently, Mr. Butterfield was named to the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Currently, he has served on the W3C's XForms working group, has been a Chrysler Design Award nominee, and continues to be an invited speaker on design topics.

Resources:

• Flickr
• Stuart Butterfield's Flickr photos
• Flickr API documentation
• Squared Circle group on Flickr
• FlickrFox
• jUploadr
• FlickrUploadr
• Organizr
• Movable Type Flickr plug-in
• WordPress Flickr plug-iin
• Flickr Postcard
• Flickr Worldmap
• Flickr Hacks group

This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Chase Southard
• Post-production audio engineer: Gardner Campbell