This morning an interesting Tweet arrived on a subject that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately:

there seem to be more people using twitter apps than twitter web. What is twitter doing wrong?
@katykat

In April 2008, ReadWriteWeb carried out a study How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients that showed that only 56% of Twitter users used the web interface. My gut feeling tells me that that figure is lower now, given the growth of use of devices like the iPhone. 

This is a perfectly valid question to be asking in the context of a traditional website. But Twitter isn’t a website, it’s more than that, it’s a service like email. You are not restricted to interacting with your email via one particular method. Likewise, by building upon Twitter using their API’s you are not restricted to using their service in the one and only way that you can, you have choice in how you interact with their service. The important thing isn’t the website, it is the service. Twitter.com could basically become a one page website and as long as the API’s were maintained the service would continue as normal for much of the twitter community. The user has a variety of choices in interacting with the service based upon their personal preferences. They can choose the relevant application based upon interface they like and the features they are going to use.

Flickr, despite having a far greater number of API’s available, hasn’t followed the same path as Twitter. Most people still interact with Flickr via the standard web interface. This is mostly due to their terms of use which forbids people replicating the user experience of Flickr:

Use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com

Rev Dan Catt who up until recently worked at Flickr said:

I’ve often joked that I could probably get more stuff done working with the Flickr API outside of Flickr than inside.

 So to answer the question, I really don’t think Twitter is doing anything wrong, they are doing everything right.

What can Libraries learn from what Twitter and to a lesser degree Flickr, are doing? Can we start to think about our catalogue (or other core services) not as a website, but as a service. The website version of the catalogue may just be one aspect of the delivery mechanism for the information we wish to distribute. Why can’t we look at providing our services to our users in any way they wish to be able to interact with them?

Why can’t we provide specialised access to our catalogues to specific user groups, so they (or anyone) can create:

• a simplified interface for high school users without all the complex features they don’t use
• allow an historical society to create an application based upon their needs
• an complex view of the catalogue for academics or librarians
• a visual or geographic based search
• a social network based around the catalogue

Institutions like the Brooklyn Museum and collaborative efforts such as DigitalNZ are providing their content to developers to do exactly this sort of thing. It’s very early days still and it will be interesting to see what starts to develop.

Let’s start thinking about interacting with the service, not the website.

I’ve been playing around with yet another Flickr Commons then and now project, this time using the images of New York from 1935-1938 from the New York Public Library.  The process for this has been a little bit different to the previous then and now demonstrations.  The images that have been posted don’t have any geo-location metadata (a latitude or longitude) so they can’t be placed directly on a map in the same manner as other Commons photographs.  What they do have instead, is very good street addresses in their titles.

The google maps API has geocoding API call that translates a human readable address into a latitude and longitude.  So if we pass the title of a photo into the API – let’s say “Willow Street, No. 113, Brooklyn”, it returns the latitude and longitude of “40.6978614, -73.9955804″.

For the demonstration I’m using a KML file.  Generating this file is now a 2 step process, import the data from Flickr using their API, pass the title of the photo into the Google Maps API to get the latitude and longitude and merge both results into a KML file.

Of course some of the titles provide ambiguous addresses or don’t provide enough information and don’t automatically return a result.  for some of the images I’ve manually tweaked the data that I’ve passed into the geocoding API to obtain a result.  The results are by no means perfect, but it’s a pretty good demonstration of what can be achieved from very little data and automating everything.

Please explore my New York then and now mashup and let me know what you think.

I recently had a bit of fun at the National Library of Australia’s Christmas party playing Michael Jackson. It was so much fun.

On November 27 the National Library of New Zealand became the sixteenth institution to join The Commons.  In what was perfect timing, within days Google launched their streetview service for New Zealand.  Of course I’ve modified my then and now mashup to include the images on Flickr from the National Library of New Zealand.  They’ve been busy geotagging their images and it’s all starting to come together and providing some interesting looks into how New Zealand has changed over time. Start exploring New Zealand then and now.

Following on from my previous then and now Flickr commons meets streetview demonstration, I started to think of how could I bring that experience to a user based upon their current location – take out the streetview and replace it with a real life view.  Can you provide an immersive experience for a user, giving them only the historical items from a cultural institutions collection, that are relevant to their current location?  Imagine being in a location with your laptop or mobile phone, and being able to see exactly what the location you are standing in looked like in the past.

For example – thanks to free wifi from the Apple Store in Sydney on George Street, I built a web application to show me my current location.  It’s pretty accurate, but not perfect.  In this case it’s showing my location as about 100m from where I actually am (on the corner of King St and George St).  I can then display all the images from Flickr Commons that relate to that area.  As you can see there are a variety of historic images available and I’ve selected an image showing Martin Place.

From where I am standing on George Street I can see the real life buildings that are shown in the historic photo.

If I then walk down George Street 100 metres I can be in the same environment where the photos were taken and can compare the historic image of my current location on my laptop to the environment I am standing in.

So how does this work?

Up until a few months ago, the only option available was to to guess the location of the user based upon their IP address.  This might have been able to give the application the city that a user was in, but it was unlikely to provide it with a more accurate location than that.  Recently two plugins based around the W3C Geolocation specification have been developed - Geode from Mozilla labs for Firefox 3 and geolocation functions have been added to Google Gears which is available for a variety of browsers.  By using these plugins I can determine a reasonably accurate latitude and longitude for a users location and if a user doesn’t have either of these plugins installed, or for privacy reasons decides not to allow these to broadcast their locations, I can fall back to using the much less accurate IP address lookup.

Once I have a users location, I can use the Flickr API to return all the images that are within a certain radius of the user.  If I also use Google Maps as the mapping application, I can also add wikipedia articles from the users current location into the mix.

Try it out

I’ve developed two prototypes, the first one returns historical images from Flickr Commons. Given that there aren’t a vast number of photos in the Commons yet, and even fewer have geolocation information added, unless you are around the Sydney CBD area, your mileage may vary.

The second prototype returns images from Flickr that have a creative commons license. As there are a lot more images available in this category, the chances of getting a result is much greater.  For either of these to work you’ll need to download one of the plugins.

• images from Flickr Commons in my location
• images from Flickr in my location