This is kind of neat: I wrote this little web application as a tag browser for Flickr photos. It works kind of like an advent calendar; you click on a tag to see a random picture from that tag pop up. You can click on my name at the top of the page to bring up a list of my contacts, then click on one of those names to see their tags. I only tested it under Safari and Firefox for mac, so it may not work on other browsers. And be aware that on a dialup connection, it’s going to be intolerably slow.
The app itself isn’t all that spectacular, but the potential is really neat. I mentioned that Flickr made its programming interface available to the public, so you can write your own front-ends and websites to get access to all the data stored on flickr. It’s a great idea, and I’m finally starting to get why people are so excited about the whole “Web 2.0” business.
It was also my first stab at doing something with AJAX, which is apparently the big buzzword for web programmers. It just means that you can interact with a page without forcing a reload of the entire thing; Flickr does it a lot, as does Netflix. It’s pretty cool.