Also their use of AJAX and inline editing was revolutionary - probably created the whole industry around first Bootstrap, then jQuery. Man - spent so much time to emulate that light pastel yellow fade when you edited a title and saved it (later provided by jQuery).

then we have companies that went the opposite way with the abomination called graphql

When I saw the headline I immediately thought of the API, this does a great job explaining its relevance in its time! It’s interesting how even programmers then were trying to learn the concept, but now “API” is common language even nontechnical people generally understand and use in conversation

In a recent thread talking about Flickr URLs I mentioned a couple of interesting technical features that Flickr had also done that I thought were worth celebrating. When gwern mentions that you should write in more detail about those things I feel you have to take that seriously. This is that attempt.

Is it just "machine tags" or was it also tags on the web in general?

I feel Flickr and del.icio.us were the first mass adopters of tags, and everyone else followed, but I'm not sure.

They didn’t mention feature flags! Their blog post on feature flags was seminal.

Excellent post. Very nostalgic. Interoperability as advantage was a thing people loved back then. But the advent of aggregators showed that you’d rapidly just become a commodity. The community that was Facebook would instead be FriendFeed because that aggregated Facebook and others. And then you had to lock it down or die. Interesting times.

Flickr was the first site I saw where you could edit some text on the screen inline, without a complete page reload to get an “edit” form.

Today this is utterly ordinary. At the time, it was remarkable.