To be honest, the idea of connecting to social content on a daily basis means very little to me other than the value it can provide in saving me in saving time or helping my business. Today, I wanted to share an article that I found that talks about Flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, etc and what they are doing for the social movement taking place on the Web.

A growing number of “social content” applications such as Flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming are making open web services part of their core offering to end users. These interfaces allow users to query, share, and manipulate the data managed on their behalf by these social content applications.

Web service interfaces make such sites more attractive to end users by removing the danger of data lock-in, while simultaneously providing the users with tools that allow them to gain the most value from their data. This translates into direct benefits for the service itself as the end users extend the reach and visibility of the application by publishing the content on their own websites and ‘blogs.

Based on a brief review of the common features of a selection of these sites, this paper suggests some best practice guidelines that developers can follow when creating new service interfaces for similar applications. [Read the rest]

[tags]blogs,del.icio.us,social content,flickr,audioscrobbler[/tags]