There are lots of great services all over the web these days. From LiveJournal, to Flickr, to Del.icio.us, to Tada, to 43Things. And, from the looks of it, these services are only going to get better and more numerous.
The availability of all of these services, however, leaves a difficult question in the minds of software developers and website owners: do we reimplement these services on our own, or two we integrate with existing services?
If I want a weblog on my site, do I simply link to LiveJournal? Do I use LiveJournal's integration options to provide a small stub to the information contained at LiveJournal? Do I use extensive integration options to make it appear as though LiveJournal isn't in use at all? Do I house my own data and use LiveJournal only for the community via syndication? Do I forget about LiveJournal all together?
If I want a gallery on my site, do I simply link to Flickr? Do I use their badging service to display recent items on my site? Do I use their API and write my own code to allow their services to be deeply integrated in my site? Do I house my own data and syndicate my image into their service for the community aspects of Flickr? Or, do I ignore Flickr all together?
Reinventing the wheel is stupid. Services like LiveJournal and Flickr are great. They are featureful, and have a great community. However, relying on these services means giving up a large piece of control. If a feature that isn't included with these services is desired, there is no way to add it. If these services dissolve, go down, or are no longer maintained, we are left without those services for who knows how long. Implementing them ourselves is possible, but means redoing what's already been done, and missing out in the community of it all. Of course, we could write even more code in order to house our own data AND participate in the community of it all.
So where do we draw the line? What do we implement in our own software, or software that we use on our own servers, and what do we rely on other services to provide for us?
The decision becomes even more difficult when we start to see these other services implementing integration methods between each other.
So where do you draw the line? What services are you willing to have hosted for you and what services do you insist on hosting yourself? What would you do if, tomorrow, those services that you rely on from others were to disappear… what would you do?
