Software As She’s Developed

We’ve done a little group exercise at the TOOLS web 2.0 patterns workshop. Designing a video website, with heavy emphasis on mashing up, e.g. show videos from youtube, grab recommendations from netflix, grab friend lists from Facebook, etc.

Here’s the full feature list (click for full image):

And the design:

We eventually identified features, at back end and front end, and listed similar sites where on might get inspiration for each feature. Interestingly, when you do this with web 2.0 sites, you end up realising you could actually implement the feature by actually using this service.

Dragos has transcribed the list we came up with (partly visible in the photo above):

Day 1: Design Exercise

Problems + Solutions (1) [MM - these were back-end features]
-Key-value store: Amazon Dynamo/S3, BigTable (Google)
-Streaming: Hulu, YouTube streaming (not Flash)
-Client time synchro service: NTP, MMORPG
-Social network integration services: Oauth, OpenID/Passport
-Mash-up engine: PopFly, Yahoo! pipes
-Monetization (social cash -> $, analytics, instrumentation): AdSense, witkey.com, SiteMeter, Elance

Problems + Solutions (2) [MM - these were front-end features]
-Video: Vimeo, Nicovideo.jp, Jaman.com
-Mood: Musicovery, Yahoo! IM, Nabaztag.com
-Friend states: Twitter
IM: Facebook/MySpace, Twitter, Shoutbox
-Recommendations: Tuneglue, Netflix, Facebook

Some Emerging Themes
-Taxonomy of social networks
-Social profile aggregation: InfoCard
-Integration of services transparent from user
(Tim O'Reilly’s innovation by assembly)
-Privacy (who sees what)
-Biggest pile wins
-Cooler than thou