At Origin Design + Communications, we subscribe to a philosophy of utilizing Open Source, Social Media, and other 3rd party applications and platforms wherever and whenever possible.
The benefits that come from this are as follows.
1. Why reinvent the wheel: If developers have already created functionality that satisfies your requirements, it seems silly to try to do it yourself. If what they have done is solid and been ‘debugged’ there is a lot of efficiency in plugging in.
2. Updates and Scalability: 3rd party solutions and open source options both benefit from the fact that there are always people working on, fixing and updating the application. Features are continuously being added as technology and trends evolve. Security issues are handled swiftly. Once again, a small team of developers are not burdened (read: $$$ for the client) with constant maintenance. In the case of multimedia applications, negligible or non-existent fees provide bandwidth and server resources beyond the scope of what a smaller site could employee to manage weighty content.
3. Multiple channels: It used to be that if you had a Youtube video embedded on your site, it was viewed as an amateurish cop-out. Now with Youtube and social media sites garnering most of the web traffic, if you do not have a presence you are missing out. The beauty is that through technology we can now use these platforms and integrate the content back onto our own site. Now we do not need to duplicate our content. We can simultaneously feed separate audiences with the same content – efficiency is the word here.
4. Customization: Most 3rd party and Social Media services have extensive instructions and capabilities to integrate their service into your own site (and even others through sharing and syndication) in a fashion that does not necessarily come at the expense of your own brand [Vimeo video player example here].
- Rory Tucker
