Sure, Organizr is great, and the folks at Ludicorp work impressively fast. However, please stop calling it and others like it web applications (I'm not saying its creators do, but others introduce that confusion, starting with Macromedia). This is a Flash application that doesn't expose its state to its host browser (to the best of my knowledge, by definition). ActiveX didn't turn COM into a web standard and likewise Flash isn't part of the fabric of the web. (It's impossible that you read this weblog and confuse the web for the internet, right?)

No wonder Organizr behaves like a desktop app, that's basically what it is, because what is Flash but a desktop runtime that happens to be integrated with most browsers? As an aside, it's funny to think that Microsoft helped Flash get its ubiquitous reach and ultimately become a development platform (rather that just a nice animation player) in order to prevent Netscape from becoming... an ubiquitous development platform. Well done Macromedia!

Back to arguing that you need to support REST to be a web app. For example, if I use Organizer's nifty widget to select a specific timeframe (which reminds me of Photoshop Album's smart recognition that time is an intuitive way to access pictures), there's no way I can share that specific state with you since the URL stays the same. Or maybe using Flash for applications makes you part of the invisible web (Flash content is not invisible to search engines anymore), like all those databases hidden behind POST forms and authentication walls. Can you belong to the web even if your content repository or application state is hidden from it? Anyway, there's an API for those inclined to complement the Flash interface with a web app, and my architectural comments are not meant to minimize Ludicorp's achievement.

08/19/04 update: read the comments, Organizr is actually a web app once you put it in the broader Flickr context. It's just a matter of better exposing the relevant URLs right from the Flash tool. This goes to show Flickr has sound fundamentals and room to grow. Exciting stuff! Also, Anil Dash and Robert Scoble chime in.

08/24/04 update: The Flickr crew not only listens, it follows up fast. Organizr now exposes URLs for selected photos and sets. If you can likewise surface the URLs for search queries, tags and date selections, I'll be a very happy camper!

11/11/04 update: Jon Udell: The state of rich Web apps.

11/20/04 update: Kevin Lynch: Making Rich Internet Apps Web-Friendly.

05/10/05 update: Flickr moves from Flash to Ajax (now live).

08/18/05 update: An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello.

Joel Spolsky is getting a lot of mileage for his essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War, and it's deserved because there are a lot of good things in there. For instance, the fact that you (mostly) don't have an install process to run web apps (or console games for that matter) is definitely something Microsoft should think long and hard about (and I'm sure they do). I'm just fed up with installing and configuring apps, and it's even worse when you want them available across 3 or 4 home PCs.

However, Joel's whole argument relies on a premise that he never bothers to back up: "[the web as a platform] is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application."

That's quite a radical assertion but it isn't reflected by facts. From digital audio, photography and video to gaming, whole software categories have grown strongly those last years, on Windows primarily but also on the Mac and consoles. Nothing more convicing than amusing demos and gizmos exist on the (HTML) web in those areas, which, by the way, happen to be the fast-expanding frontier of digital lifestyles, so that's what matters in terms of consumer adoption and developer interest (and just look at what software people buy and use). The fact is, developers kept targeting Windows and other non-web platforms all along, and users have asked for more. Even online there's been an explosion of desktop applications. Don't bother telling Joel Spolsky about the many developers who create instant messaging or file sharing applications or newsreaders (many of them on Windows) and the dozens of millions of users who download and install them, he's busy making an important point. After reading Joel's memo, no doubt Epic Games will surely stop using DirectX (gasp, the latest version even) and commit to creating Unreal Tournament 2005 in the browser.

The platform switch challenge for Microsoft is well known and Joel may yet be proved right in the long run, but the game is far from over and his calling the score is quite premature. Remember that he said .NET was vaporware four years ago only to say now that ASP.NET is the best web dev platform. In this week's essay, where's the acknowledgement that at the time he got excited by a vague whitepaper but his sanguine statements were since then proved wholly incorrect? You're right, there's none. We've heard this kind of hubris about the end of the Microsoft API from the Java guys for years and look where it got them: definitely somewhere, but even more definitely, far from everywhere, and certainly in less computers than Microsoft.

Photoshop Album is one of those rare applications that make meta tagging so easy that even "normal people" can use it. Now, let's say I want to create a taxonomy and share it with other users, is there a way to do it so that a) they don't need to re-create those tags, and b) they're going to use my controlled vocabulary in order to avoid alternate spellings and other discrepancies? I could even throw in some fun such as nice, well chosen thumbnails for all those tags. (Don't you love an app than lets you choose your own thumbnails to visualize metatags? And you should see the feature in action, it's very graceful.)

The goal is to keep everyone on the same page to feed a common database. Is there an explicit intersection between desktop photo management tools and the semantic web (say, an ontology created with Protégé)? Any leads are appreciated, and this question is not limited to Photoshop Album, so if this is possible with, say, iView MediaPro (which supports so-called "catalog sets") or ACDSee, I'm eager to hear about it (in the comments for everyone to enjoy), thanks.

I should point out that the Fotonotes/Fotowiki approach is interesting, and I love how Flickr lets you annotate pictures (though I didn't try it myself yet), but my idea is to structure things as much as possible, so the two approaches are in my opinion complimentary rather than swappable.