November 30th, 2005

Evslin on Bubble 2.0 and APIs

Tom Evslin, in a typically thoughtful pair of posts, Bubble 2.0 – It’s The APIs and Bubble 2.0 – Why Not APIs?, addressed the topic of APIs. Beginning with a concise historical background he covers the strategy behind providing APIs and answers the question, why would a provider not want to build an API? A: time, commitment, market protectionism, abuse prevention and security risks. But argues these issues should not dissuade companies from providing APIs:

“Becoming a platform will be the road to fame and glory - not to mention riches - for many Web 2.0 services. Success will be determined by the usefulness of the underlying service and how attractive it is to third party developers and to other services. And, of course, how well it is marketed to developers.”

Recommended reading. (I first subscribed to Tom’s blog after running across his amusing and useful 4 part series Managing Programmers for CEOs and the matching Managing CEOs for Programmers.)

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Posted by John Musser as General at 12:58 AM | No Comments »

World News Map

Adam DuVander has used the RSS feed of the Washington Post and Google Maps to create a World News Maps. There have been other news maps mashups before but the useful variation here is how it tries to show a simple interpretation of newsworthiness. How? By using color to represent the quantity of stories in a given region over the past 14 days.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:09 AM | No Comments »

November 29th, 2005

Mapping Reviews

Some market segments have taken to adding maps as features to their sites more quickly than others: real estate, job search, news, and anything ‘local’ (even the seminal mashup HousingMaps was all about real estate). Following along that path of local content, the latest category of sites leveraging maps are the new generation of community recommendation and ratings services. Two recent cases in point are:

• Yelp’s new Maptastic service. A very well executed user interface allows you to either browse by clicking and zooming on the map or by using the categories and individual results selections on the left. Nice level of integration along with a reasonable quantity and caliber of reviews (at least for those cities and topics covered).



• Judy’s Book now offers maps.judysbook.com. This service also places reviews in geographic context but the interface is not as well executed as Yelp’s: posts are chronologically listed along side the map and the overall feel is a bit clunkier. But they’re just getting started so this will likely improved soon (this Seattle-based startup just received $8 million in financing).

Apparently no self-respecting recommendation service can go without one now. [via and via]

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:10 AM | No Comments »

November 28th, 2005

Most Popular Mashups

Want to know which mashups and other examples people find most interesting? Try programmableweb.com/popular. As inspired by del.icio.us/popular this new feature lets you see which links are most popular with users. In this case rather than users’ bookmarks it’s mashups and other API examples. It’s a little feature but kind of interesting to see.

There are two variations of what ‘popular’ means: the first is ‘Visits’ which is how many times have people visited those sites by clicking on links from here and the second is ‘Votes’ based on an average ‘rating’ where people have explicitly voted on a 1 to 5 scale. The latter is a feature I added awhile back but never really publicized. You can rate any link by viewing its ‘Detail’ page, like this one for HousingMaps.

If it was sorted in the opposite order would it be /unpopular?

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 12:45 AM | 1 Comment »

AlexaDex and Amazdaq Games

Colin M. Saunders has used web services to create two unique stock market type games. The first, AlexaDex, is a market-style game based on website values. You sign-up and start out with $10K of funny money you can invest in URLs. The value of any given URL goes up or down over time based on Alexa’s rankings for that site’s current reach.

Or, perhaps you’d prefer to spend idle time with Colin’s amazdaq. As the he says on the site “amazdaq is a stock-market -type game, using amazon.com sales ranks as prices. To play, create an amazon.com listmania list, then copy and paste your list’s URL into the box below. Add products to your list before they become popular, remove them when they reach their peak!”

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:10 AM | 1 Comment »

November 27th, 2005

Vint Cerf on Mashups

When Internet pioneer and Google executive Vint Cerf was asked what he thought of the mashup phenomenon in a new ComputerWorld interview he responded:

I can’t tell you how excited I am about it. We know we don’t have a corner on creativity. There are creative people all around the world, hundreds of millions of them, and they are going to think of things to do with our basic platform that we didn’t think of. So the mashup stuff is a wonderful way of allowing people to find new ways of applying the basic infrastructures we’re propagating. This will turn out to be a major source of ideas for applying Google-based technology to a variety of applications.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 10:14 PM | No Comments »

eBay AuctionMapper

Auction Mapper is an interesting little application built on the eBay API that gives fast Flash-based search results on a map (and not Google or other public API map). But it’s useful for being more search than map. Sliders above map that display items based on criteria such a price, number of bids, time/deadline, and distance from you.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:17 AM | No Comments »

November 26th, 2005

More Yahoo! APIs

So in all of the recent flurry of new Yahoo! APIs where most attention went to Maps (again), there were a couple others worth noting:

• Term Extraction API: This service returns a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content. It’s a contextual search technology and is one of the technologies used in Y!Q. Granted, not as readily understood as a Mapping API, but very useful (see below).
• Image Search API: As name implies, use it to search the Internet for image content. Essentially a programmatic interface to Yahoo Image Search.

Chad Dickerson has an interesting post on the Term Extraction API noting how it’s used in creating TagCloud.com.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:35 AM | 2 Comments »

November 25th, 2005

Flickrmap: Photos + Maps

Mark Zeman has created Flickrmap, a web service that allows you to put a Flash based world map on your own website or blog. Flickrmap automatically searches your photos at Flickr for location information and plot the photos on your own Flickrmap. It maps photos based on tags you supply like city or country name and supports photos that have been geotagged or photos that have location data encoded in their EXIF properties.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

November 24th, 2005

LivePlasma

Frederic Vavrille, based in France, created LivePlasma, a visually rich Flash application that builds on the Amazon recommendation API to show the relationship between movies, bands, actors, etc. Similar to the previously mentioned CoverPop you can go straight from interacting to making purchases. [via]

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 6:36 AM | No Comments »