bad idea jeans

Solid critique over at New Curator from a week or two ago about the Creative Spaces Beta release by a consortium of UK Museums. The project sounds well and good “throwing open the collections,” and so forth, but in reality, it seems to amount to no more than a camouflaged google search.

Which leads us to a bigger pet peeve about organizational web initiatives — YOU DO NOT NEED TO RECREATE GOOGLE/FACEBOOK/YOUTUBE/DELICIOUS/TWITTER ON YOUR SITE — the nature of the web is to distribute services that span networks, not for each site to re-invent these services according to its own skins. Look, the internet is our best friend, and we appreciate the power of new technologies and open source movements (steve.museum and flickr commons come to mind), but there’s just no need to reinvent the wheel.