Dave Winer released “FlickrFan” a couple days ago, a screensaver that pulls images from the Flickr API and sends them to your hardware display device of choice. Except it’s not really a screensaver, not according to Dave Winer in a testy series of exchanges with Mathew Ingram.
It sure looks like a screensaver, with additional (simple) image upload capabilities. To suppose that this stretches any envelope whatsoever is wishful thinking. However, Winer released a FlickrFan Manifesto, which speaks to his enthusiasm, if not hubris. I’m with Ingram — where is the revolution here? What new ground has been broken? Commenters over at Scobleizer are pointing out all of the many examples of prior art. If I gave a two-sentence description of this app to one of my developers, is there any reason they couldn’t come up with yet another example in a few days that does essentially the same thing?
It’s a little painful to watch Winer acolytes tripping all over themselves to reach up and grasp the hem of his robe on this one.
A hilarious example from commenter donpark (from Mathew Ingram’s blog):
Dave’s strength is not in doing something first but seeing the gem of something wonderful beyond the mundane, like screensavers, and shining a huge spotlight on it until rest of us sees it as well […] I myself don’t see it yet but am willing to suspend disbelief because stuff Dave shines light on tends to be, like a flower, takes time to feel the impact.
Oh PLEASE. Which canny lad first said “trust your senses?” Descartes? This prescription was later vulgarized to “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…it’s a duck!”
Sorry Dave, but FlickrFan looks an awfully lot like a duck.
The Pursuit of a Life 
Weren’t we connecting computers to TVs in the early ’90s?
Actually, the early ’80s: the Commodore 64. Unfortunately the video output wasn’t quite 1080p yet 🙂