September 30th, 2005

Microsoft Maps Mashups

A interesting set of mashups built on Microsoft MapPoint and MSN Virtual Earth (many available at the Virtual Earth Gallery):

• NASA Space Station Map: See the current location of the NASA Space Station overlaid onto a MSN Virtual Earth (VE) map.
• geotagr: Use MSN Virtual Earth to geotag your Flickr photos or browse tagged photos on VE maps.
• Blog Explorer: Find and browse blogs by location with MapPoint maps and FeedMap.
• News Events Mapped: Mashup of news events (via MSNBC) mapped onto Virtual Earth maps
• PhotoMap: Nikhil Kothari’s photos of San Diego area mapped by location on Virtual Earth. Nice DHTML effects.
• America 24/7: Virtual Earth used to plot photos from the America 24/7 project.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:15 AM | No Comments »

September 29th, 2005

Mashups: Tagzania, Hibbard, LinkPut

Since the Mashup Matrix went up this week there’ s been lots of positive feedback, new mashups submitted, and site traffic has gone up again (thanks in part to pickups by O’Reilly Radar, BusinessWeek and activity from del.icio.us).

Here’s some of the added mashups:

• Tagzania: Social bookmarking and folksonomies for Google Maps .
• Where’s Tim Hibbard?: Interesting use of Google Maps: you can follow Tim as he always carries a GPS-enabled mobile phone and data gets plotted on a Google Map (also uses Cloudberry and his own EnGraph).
• LinkPut: LinkPut is an experiment that attempts to create a better search experience combining Yahoo search with a wiki type community collaboration to better define the information describing the results returned.

More updates coming shortly.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:38 AM | No Comments »

September 26th, 2005

Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix is Online

The Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix is now online here at ProgrammableWeb.

What is it? It’s an experimental interactive grid with Web 2.0 API’s along each axis and the intersecting cells correspond to the mashups made by combining each pair of APIs. As you move the cursor across the grid a box dynamically displays details about each intersection. You can go directly from the matrix to view the examples or drill-down into this site’s API database. The page is updated daily. You can get more details at the matrix’s About page.

There are approximately 30 mashups included now but this list should grow quickly over the next few weeks. Readers are welcome to contribute mashups and examples through this simple form.

Mashups are a very interesting piece of the Web 2.0 puzzle and in some ways the most interesting piece. I’ll post more on them shortly. In the meantime here are links to a couple of recent mainstream press mashup stories: BusinessWeek’s “Mix, Match and Mutate” and The Economist’s “Mashing the Web”.

The matrix is certainly the biggest addition to the site since launch. Given that this is a v1 release there is undoubtedly room for improvement and new ideas (some of which are listed on the matrix about page). Hopefully it’s both useful and a bit fun. Feedback welcome.

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 1:21 AM | 2 Comments »

September 23rd, 2005

Hurricane Rita Mapped

Near real-time tracking of Hurricane Rita overlaid onto a Google Map. From the Central Florida Hurricane Center.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, News at 6:24 AM | No Comments »

Urban Dictionary

Two API additions today:

• Urban Dictionary: an API for when you’re curious about what frontin, party foul, low pro po, and tool really mean.
• AmphetaRate: a news feed aggregation service.

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Posted by John Musser as General at 6:03 AM | No Comments »

September 22nd, 2005

Examples: Web Cams and Deals

Examples added today:

• Dealazon: an Amazon API-based appliction from Pete Freitag. Offers deal search and RSS subscriptions.
• Web Cam Locator: uses Google Maps to show web cams by location.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 6:10 AM | No Comments »

September 21st, 2005

A Couple More Mashups

A couple of interesting mashups:

• Placeopedia: allows you to geographically place Wikipedia articles on top of Google maps.
• Daily Mashup: combines currently popular items from Flickr, Del.icio.us, furl, and Yahoo News.

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September 20th, 2005

CheapGas and SmugMaps

A couple of examples / mashups added:

• Cheap Gas: a clever way to find cheap gas (if that’s still possible) via combination of Google Maps and gas price data.
• smugMaps: overlays smugMug photos onto Google Maps.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 6:23 AM | No Comments »

September 18th, 2005

HotOrNot API

A couple of interesting additions to the API database:

• HotOrNot, the dating/rating site that had quite a buzz last year, also offers an API. There’s also a fun mashup of this with Google Maps.
• Cdyne provides a variety of data over web services. For example, includes Phone Verifier and Credit Card Verifier functions. Primarily a commercial, fee-based service.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 10:00 AM | 1 Comment »

September 16th, 2005

Web API Sites, Unite

Chris Law who last week started the wsfinder wiki, blog and very interesting Map of the Web 2.0 World has suggested that it might make sense to join forces, along with the new Web API Tracker blog, “give the community one definitive place to go” for Web API resources. I completely agree. Given the degree of interest (see below for evidence) I think that by working jointly we can do more, and do it more cohesively, than we could on our own. Funny how in just a few weeks there went from being no centralized resources on the topic to at least three.

(Speaking of interest in the topic, in just the last two weeks at ProgrammableWeb here’s some of what’s happened: starting Labor Day weekend traffic skyrocketed (as noted earlier); number of Google links to “ProgrammableWeb” went from less than 10 to about 36,000; there’s a few hundred blog subscribers; almost 1,000 del.cio.us bookmarks; and the site got some very nice comments from folks like Chad Dickerson and Richard MacManus as well as an O’Reilly Radar pickup . Surprised the heck out of me.)

Now that there’s a few of us working on this topic it should be all the better by building a wider community.

Chris, I’ll buy the next round ;-)

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Posted by John Musser as General at 6:28 AM | 2 Comments »