Web 2.0 Architectures

Ofoto and Flickr

Ofoto began life as an online photography service based in Berkeley, California. The service provided three basic features:

• It let people upload JPEG images so that others could view them by simply visiting the website.

• It let people create photo albums and share them online with friends.

• It enabled users to purchase prints online. This feature was supposed to be the foundation for Ofoto’s business model, which was based on the premise that people would want traditional, printed photographs.

Ofoto later added a 35mm online film processing service and an online frame store, as well as some other services, but its core pattern still embraced a core model of static publishing. In May 2001, Eastman Kodak purchased Ofoto, and the Ofoto Web Service was rebranded in 2005 as the Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

Flickr is another photo-sharing platform, but it was built with the online community in mind, rather than the idea of selling prints. Flickr made it simple for people to tag or comment on each other’s images, and for developers to incorporate Flickr into their own applications. Flickr is properly a community platform and is justifiably seen as one of the exemplars of the Web 2.0 movement. The site’s design and even the dropped e in the company name are now firmly established in Web 2.0’s vernacular.

Applicable Web 2.0 Patterns

This comparison involves the following patterns:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

• Participation-Collaboration

• Mashup

• Rich User Experience

• The Synchronized Web

• Collaborative ...