January 31st, 2006

Music, Spam, and Innovation Maps

Three different kinds of map examples added over the past couple of days (two of the geographic type, one of visualization sort):

• Musicmap: Uses a Flash interface for a novel music search mechanism for finding albums similar to the ones you know.
• Spam Map: The handy Mailinator service gives you free and disposable email address. But they get spam too. Lots of it. About a million a day. This shows you the spam source locations.
• Web 2.0 Innovation Map: Google Maps mashup of Web 2.0 applications showing where approximately 200 web startups are located. By Ryan Williams.

Note that the Innovation Map uses Google Maps for display and the Yahoo! Geocoding API for converting addresses to latitude and longitude coordinates. This pairing is becoming a popular combination these days as Google does not offer a geocoding service and Yahoo!’s web service is quite good.

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

January 30th, 2006

Recent Popular Favorites

MashupFeed now supports the ability to view “recent popular” mashups in addition to the “all time popular”. Just click on Recent in upper right of Popular grid. As with del.icio.us/popular it can interesting to see what’s popular lately. In this case it shows the top 10 from the last 30 days. At the moment this site is adding somewhere between 80-90 new entries/month.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Site News at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

January 28th, 2006

Mashup Ecosystem on ZDNet

David Berlind’s ZDNet post yesterday does a very nice job of analyzing the “exploding mashup ecosystem” and draws some accurate comparisons between the traditional operating system platforms and the new Internet platform. Check-out the diagrams. This ties nicely to some updates coming here soon.

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Posted by John Musser as News, Press at 3:00 PM | No Comments »

January 27th, 2006

Gadgets at Microsoft Search Champs

This week Microsoft hosted their Search Champs v4 event in Redmond where they invited an interesting group of people in to preview search-related products, strategy, and more in order to get some very direct feedback. I was there and although some of what was discussed was under tight NDA some things weren’t. One of the more notable things here concerned live.com and gadgets.

Microsoft’s live.com initiative is shaping-up to be more than just another “my” dashboard. Why? Because it’s going to be a real Platform.

First of all this will be available online and offline with the same programming model supported in both (offline not only in the upcoming Windows Vista but also in an update to Windows XP). You’ll be able to develop them together and then ultimately do things like drag and drop gadgets from your web page to the desktop or the other way round.

Secondly, while gadgets may at first glance seem like not much more than clocks, stock tickers and weather forecasts, there’s a reasonably sophisticated programming model shaping-up under the covers. This will lead to some interesting development possibilities. For example, Microsoft’s Sanaz Ahari, the PM for live.com, showed us a soon-to-be-released gadget that allows remote control of your Windows Media Center device from the portal. For a good summary and screenshot of this see TechCrunch. (And while Tivo and Yahoo are partnering it’s not (yet) this type of developer-driven coding.)

Third, since the initial Live.com announcement back in November, developers have been out there creating some interesting gadgets. The recording gadget above is just one example. Visit microsoftgadgets.com to see. These are giving Yahoo Widgets a run for their money and it’s Google who’s the me-too entrant with their Modules.

As for the Search Champs event itself: very well run, excellent mix of attendees, genuine two-way dialog (sometimes lively), and valuable experience all-round.

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft, Widgets at 6:32 PM | 1 Comment »

MashupCamp Podcast

There’s a good podcast interview by Chris Law with MashupCamp co-organizer David Berlind. They cover a lot of ground including the inspiration and history behind MashupCamp, how the nascent eco-system behind APIs and mashups are setting the stage for growth and innovation of online applications, and some thoughts on where this all is headed.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Media at 6:49 AM | 2 Comments »

January 25th, 2006

Fighting Splogs via SplogSpot API

Splogs, otherwise known as spam blogs, have become the latest online blight. And while these fake blogs are littering-up the Web there are some ways to fight back, one of which is through a service called SplogSpot. It’s a spam blog search engine that tracks splogs. For a little more background see Search Engine Journal.

Looking the recent splogs list you can see there are dozens added every day. They also offer an API allowing their splog database to be queried in case you want to verify the validity of a given blog.

As they say, their service is “All splogs, no blogs!”

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Law, News at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

January 22nd, 2006

ADTmag: The Web Is the Platform

The Web Is the Platform, a new story by John K. Waters over at Application Development Trends magazine profiles the major web services developer programs from eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google and Salesforce.com (conspicuously missing is Microsoft). It includes some good analysis of the issues including this look at the ‘worries both ways’:

The relationships between developers and ecommerce platform companies carry risks for both sides. For the eBays and Yahoos, there’s a danger that developers will “game the systems,” Enderle says. “The retailers are often compensated based on a series of metrics,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s the number of Web-page hits; sometimes it’s the duration or some other quantifiable element. The more competent some of these [developers] get, the more capable they are at maximizing their incentive returns without necessarily providing the connected value. Gaming some of these services will undoubtedly become one of the next big careers.”

For developers, there are the usual risks associated with being tied to one platform. Another concern is none of these companies has been supporting third-party developers for long. “The truth is, they’re all pretty new at this stuff,” Enderle says. “They’re really just figuring out how to support these thirdparty developers. The developer should keep in mind that they’re dealing with well-meaning people who haven’t learned how to do this yet.”

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Money, News at 12:08 PM | No Comments »

January 19th, 2006

New APIs: Mint and Pixagogo

Just a quick note on a couple of new APIs recently added to the API database:

• Pepper: This API creates an open framework on top of Shaun Inman’s well regarded web site metrics and reporting product Mint. (Side note: Shaun is one of the speakers at next month’s sold-out workshop The Future of Web Apps taking place in London.)
• Pixagogo: Build photo applications using the Pixagogo service using either their REST and SOAP APIs. Even though photo APIs like this and the Flickr API can be used to create interesting and/or useful applications, as Richard MacManus points out, it’s the mapping APIs that get the most attention.

About 10 APIs have been added over the past month. Thanks to readers as well as some of the API providers for submitting and updating these APIs. (Not all entries are fully documented yet — use the API feed to keep abreast of updates and new entries.)

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 6:04 AM | No Comments »

January 17th, 2006

New How-To Articles

If you want to create your own mashups and applications, here’s a few new how-to programming articles now available on the /howto page :

• How To Add a Google Map To Your Web Page…Fast from Exploration Age shows how easy it can be to add a Google Map to any page. Nice straightforward demonstration.
• Google Maps AJAX and ASP.NET shows how to create an ASP.NET server control that would allow a .NET developer to harness the power of Google Maps in the code-behind model.
• A Google Maps Mash-up at Javaworld.com shows how to use the geocoder.us service, the open source library DRW: Direct Web Remoting, SOAP, and some server-side Java to do dynamic geocoding and mapping.
• All About Where’s Tim Hibbard is a backgrounder by Tim, the guy whose location is always viewable to the world, day and night. Using his GPS enabled Nextel phone and a variety of Ajax and .NET code you can find him. This article is not so much a how-to on using his API, yes he has one, but a good dissection of how his application was built on a variety of technologies, including Google Maps and WeatherBug.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Enterprise, Site News at 4:57 AM | No Comments »

January 16th, 2006

Mashup Camp Update

Note that the dates and location have now been set for David Berlind and Doug Gold’s Mashup Camp: February 20th and 21st at the Computer History Museum. Response to this event has been strong and it’s nearly full, so if you are interested in joining then you’ll want to sign-up soon. Less than 20 of the original 250 invites remain…. Great list of attendees. Thanks to David, Doug and the Friends of Mashup Camp for putting this together. You can still put your name on the waiting list.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:06 AM | No Comments »