Lockr: Access Control for Web 2.0

The major difficulty that I see with all those Web 2.0 social networking websites is that there is no central administration but one for each website you are a member of. Want to share some private photos with friends at Flickr ? Then tell them they need access to Flickr so that you can add them. Want to share some stuff at Facebook ? Tell them they need a Facebook account. Want to Twitter ? Tell them.. You get the point.

More sites are going live each day and it’s a complete mess to keep up with your friends and make them your friends on those new sites as well. Lockr is a Facebook application that tries to create a central administration for your social networking sites. It currently supports only Flickr and Facebook but more are planned and will follow.

The basic principle of Lockr is to give non-members access to your private content. Non-members are your friends who do not want to join that social networking site but still like to see the pictures that you upload at Flickr for instance.

Since Lockr is a Facebook application your friends need to be member of Facebook but that’s it. From there users can give permission to access private pages on other social networks. You need the Firefox add-on if you want to share private pictures with your friends at Flickr.

The next release will be Lockr for Bittorrent which adds Lockr to Azureus. I think that this is one service to look after in the coming months.