Heavy Lifting (save money – don't reinvent the wheel)

In this post I’m going to explore the concept of ‘heavy lifting’ and demonstrate how collaborating with 3rd parties can increase user interaction with your site whilst reducing development costs.

What is Heavy Lifting?

Various community websites have emerged as leaders in their niche – Flickr is most people’s first call for photo storage, YouTube for online video, and Facebook is now pretty much ubiquitous. Each of these sites, and many others, offer an API (Application Programming Interface), which is a way for developers (given the appropriate permissions) to hook in to their data, extract it and manipulate it. By enabling their content to be used in this fashion, these sites are doing a lot of the hard work for us – the heavy lifting – so we can get on with the task in hand (getting a collection of photos to use in a gallery on our site, playing a video on our homepage, or even allowing a user to select a list of their friends so they don’t have to look them up and type them in to our site manually).

Another interesting use of this technique is user authentication – standards such as OpenId allow users to sign into various different websites using a single login, eliminating the need to keep their personal information synchronised across a range of websites.

What are the advantages?

As a site owner implementing heavy lifting, you’ll benefit from decreased development costs  (your developers won’t need to reinvent the wheel),  decreased bandwidth costs (streaming videos in particular are pretty expensive in terms of data throughput) and, vitally, you’ll be harvesting the fruit of  the thousands of hours of research and labour that these third parties have put into developing their user experience to the extent that they’ve become a market leader.

For users the benefit is immediately obvious – no one likes repetitive work, so being able to put a picture or video into a gallery on your site simply by tagging it in Flickr or Youtube is a far more appealing prospect than logging in to your site to upload it manually. Online communities live and die based on the amount of people willing to actively participate, so making participation as painless as possible is the key.

A demonstration

In my next post I’m going to demonstrate an integration with last.fm, taking some data about the listening habits of the Cubeworks team, manipulating it, and displaying it in a small web application or widget.