I have an ... idea!

I have an ... idea!

For a long time, I have been wondering about the pros and cons of using services like del.icio.us, Flickr, and GMail instead of dealing with your own links, photos, and mail in a private, non-commercial fashion.

Clearly the power of aggregating everybody's opinions on media and having somebody else maintain the computers on which your data resides are both really nice. But then it's not really your own stuff and it's hard to present the content in a way that is uniquely yours.

With the advent of RSS, we could fix all of this, I think. For example, del.icio.us was nice enough to help me publish my own bookmarks. Now if I were to use javascript to AJAX-up the xml, I could still present my bookmarks/tagging on my own site, while the tagging is still compiled into a valuable resource!

I hereby ask GMail to work on IMAP and Flickr to increase their upload limits and provide RSS feeds of different albums :-) What do you mean, "It destroys their ad-based business models" ? I can stil hope, can't I ?

Geek-sense: tingling!

Update:

So I was reading a little more, and this guy kind pointed out something pretty slick. XSLT is designed to reformat XML, so why not use it? One issue is that the XML has to point to it. This guy points out that you could use javascript to dynamically rewrite the XML to point to the desired XSLT. This way you can leave all the messy parsing and HTML'ing to the XSLT.