Recently I’ve been thinking about ease of use of interfaces. As you may know, I’ve a Flickr account where I post my photographs; I also have a deviantART account for the same purpose.
Generally, when I take pictures, I post any that are reasonably good to Flickr without even thinking about it. I can use the web form and upload five at a time, or I can mail them in; I have my own script for mailing them that I may post at some point.
Uploading to deviantART requires me to use the web form and upload one at a time, and go through a lot of rigmarole that’s not necessary with Flickr — for example, Flickr lets you set a default CC licence for your pictures; deviantART does allow you to specify one, but you must do it individually for each picture; it’s not possible to set a default.
I didn’t really consciously think about it; I just uploaded them to Flickr because it’s easy.
It’s also easy to do things with them; Flickr, like any good Web 2.0 site, has an API that I’ve hardly even begun to look at, but it means I can follow my friends’ activity from the comfort of my mail client, and any new photos get shown on my Facebook profile. deviantART has RSS feeds, but most of them are so well-hidden as to be completely useless.
Something to think about for my final-year project, or any other web stuff I happen to write in the future — multiple access methods for data, both incoming and outgoing.