More Flickr Synchronicity
I just remembered that I have an even better example of Flickr synchronicity that I amazingly neglected to mention in my previous post on the subject.
As some of you may remember, back when I used Blosxom I spent a chunk of time developing a Blosxom photo gallery plugin called Pixom. When I started working on Pixom, I spent some time looking at prior art, and discovered that a New Yorker named DeWitt Clinton had already developed a plugin called photogallery. I ended up borrowing a lot from his approach, but adding things like on-board EXIF parsing. Because I thought he was a smart guy, I started reading his weblog.
Before long, DeWitt moved to San Francisco to work for A9, and I followed his apartment hunt with great interest, since I was about to go through a similar search moving from Cupertino up to the city.
When DeWitt started using Flickr, he and I added each other as contacts and started following each other’s photos. Eventually, I posted a photo of the, shall we say, distinctive view out my back window, as well as several from my building’s roof. A little while later, I got an email from DeWitt asking me if I was aware that he lived right above me. As it turns out, he has nearly the same view from his window, one floor above, and based on my Flickr photos he was able to determine that we were, in fact, neighbors!
I finally met DeWitt for the first time today, at our building’s rooftop party for the Haight Street Fair. It was pretty crazy sitting there on the roof talking to this guy whose weblog I had found through a Google search back when he lived on the other side of the country. I guess sometimes this social software stuff really does work–score another one for Flickr world glue!
June 13th, 2005 at 5:00 am
Cool stories!
Really make me thing about using such services as well. With problems for me being that their usage density where I live will be much lower and thus such effect much less likely - at least in the short term.
My other point of discomfort with Flickr is that you seem to have to upload your photos to their server. Probably meaning that you could lose all your photos and the data belonging to them should Flickr go bust or evil a few years down the road. I quite like having a working ‘backup’ of such data on my own computer/server.
In fact, that’s the same ‘problem’ I have with delicious - not having my bookmarks on my computer. I’d quite like having a backup copy here - just in case. Any plans to add a local export of the downloaded bookmarks to Cocoalicious?
June 13th, 2005 at 7:03 am
Thanks to AppleScript I was actually able to quickly make my own backup… cool.
Not quite perfect (say, because AppleScript uses localised dates by default and because the output seems to be UTF-16 for some reason) but potentially useful, I guess.
http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/other/Export%20Delicious%20Bookmarks.scpt
June 13th, 2005 at 10:33 am
That’s an awesome story. It’s nice - and rare - when social technologies actually work to bring people together in real actual physical meatspace.
I just moved to SF a couple weeks ago. I had no idea the Haight Street Fair was going on yesterday and I was showing a visiting friend around the city when we stumbled into it. Just crazy. The pervasive open container violations were really the least of it.
June 14th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
And for what it’s worth, I think it’s a great story, too. The funny thing is, I think I might have read Sci-Fi Hi-Fi before that anyway…
-DeWitt
June 15th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
Out of hiding and into the fire
At last year’s WWDC, I (purposely) kept a really low profile. I was already working on a new app for OS X, stemming from an idea that Dan Wood approached me about a few years ago. Dan, of course, was across the street at JavaOne demo’ing Project Alam…