Over the last couple of years, I have argued more or less strenuously for the build of an academic Flickr: a net-based service that would enable faculty and researchers to post and share images with scholarly value, either with the general community, or pursuant to any associated rights, to restricted-use populations.

While not a simple proposition, I believe that an application combining (at least some of) the rich user interaction offered by Flickr with high-value image (and potentially video) content would be seductive to both the academy and the general population. One of my motivators has been, frankly, to remove libraries and other organizational actors from unnecessary mediation. The ability of those most directly engaged with images to push content directly into a distributed system seems to me critical; assuming that a library or academic department would serve as curator or an intermediary aggregator is a surefire kiss of death for rapid adoption and widespread use.

A few days ago, I was having lunch with my friend Raymond Yee. Raymond, who has just written a book on Web 2.0 mashups, has been teaching content and service integration at the UC Berkeley I-School over the past semester. The conversation produced a "duh!" moment for me.

What I realized through the course of my conversation with Raymond was that the most critical aspect of a new Flickr like service is not really an attractive user experience. Certainly, that's essential to help find images and associate data with them; it's also what makes an application desirable enough to initiate use.

However, what will make the application ultimately successful is the availability of open services that permit re-use: mashups that encourage integration with other services and content. It is this feature - the ability to disintermediate the content, at least partially, from the restricting frame of the application - that is the most fundamentally important virtue of Flickr, and should be for any application that is premised on widespread internet adoption and use. Support for re-use enables a plethora of user experiences to be designed and developed. The needs of mobile users are distinct from highly interactive uses in in-world education, and in turn vastly different from many research imperatives.

For an academic Flickr/YouTube-like service to thrive, a well- specified and clean API that permits unimpeded access to the power of the application is the most important architectural design focus. An academic Flickr should support services for authentication, various forms of discovery, content push, content updating, and content acquisition.

Design for use.