December 18th, 2007

292 Flickr Mashups

The Flickr API continues to be one of the most popular Web 2.0 APIs and with a flurry of new photo mashups here lately, we now have 292 Flickr mashups listed. Overall they run a very wide range of creative applications, here are three of the most recent entries:

• flickrbackup: A Java-based Flickr backup utility that lets you back up all your photos on Flickr.



• Feel Image: Search multiple photo sharing sites. Has technology that quantifies colors like red or blue in images, making it possible to show search results by color. Search phrases like: red flower in spring.



• Custom iGoogle Skins: This new version of the skins gadget integrates Flickr and iGoogle to being you random images from a user specified Flickr group.

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Posted by John Musser as Media, PopularAllTime, Yahoo, photo at 2:10 AM | 4 Comments »

December 4th, 2007

Man on the Street Video: What’s a Mashup?

At last month’s Mashup Camp Europe over in Dublin, Ireland the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) team of Chad Dickerson and Tom Hughes-Croucher brought along their Y! video cam and journeyed out to see if they could get Dublin’s citizens and visitors to answer the question “What’s a mashup?”. From the dry delivery to the semi-censored responses, the fun video “Man on the Streets…of Dublin, we hit the streets to see what a ‘mash-up’ is” gives you the answers:

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Posted by John Musser as PopularAllTime, Video, Yahoo at 2:36 AM | 1 Comment »

October 9th, 2007

Can an API Steal Data?

In a very lively forum thread over at Flickr there’s a discussion/debate about the Flickr API, data ownership, copyright, and mashups. In a nutshell, a Flickr member, Austen Haines, noticed that some of his photos were appearing in the mashup Adactio Elsewhere even though he had flagged them All Rights Reserved (ARR). The mashup developer, Jeremy Keith, replied and noted that this was just the behavior of the API and that it “sounds like there’s a glitch in the system”. The discussion is still ongoing, and the initial thread kicked-off a second thread, this with the provacative title Flickr photos stolen by the thousands through the Flickr API. (And interesting to note that our Adactio mashup profile is one of the earliest mashups listed on ProgrammableWeb and is consistently ranked in the top 20 of our all-time most popular mashups.)

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law, PopularAllTime, Security, Yahoo, photo at 12:51 AM | 5 Comments »

September 12th, 2007

Mashup Acquired by The Weather Channel

Demonstrating that a sufficiently talented solo mashup developer can succeed in building an application worthy of purchase by a major corporation, David Schorr’s terrific Weatherbonk was aqcuired by The Weather Channel Interactive yesterday. The mashup does a great job of integrating disparate sources like weather and traffic cams, news reports, multiple data sources, and historical averages. You can even put in a travel route and get weather forecasts that follow-along your path.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Mapping, Money, PopularAllTime at 3:33 AM | 6 Comments »

September 10th, 2007

Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site

In a very interesting interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Sean Ammirati at Read/WriteTalk asks some good questions about the role of the the Twitter API in their success and plans going forward. Two things that jumps out is that Biz’s comment that the API has 10x the traffic of the website and that of all that’s happened with Twitter in the past year that “the amount of activity around the API has been the most surprising experience”. (Our Twitter API profile here.)

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Posted by John Musser as Mobile, Money, PopularAllTime at 2:23 AM | 18 Comments »

August 3rd, 2007

Monetize Your Google Maps

In a somewhat quiet but noteworthy move the Google Maps API now gives developers an officially sanctioned way to overlay advertisements directly onto their maps. And share the revenue. This was announced by Google’s Pamela Fox in the maps API newsgroup. You access this new functionality through an API object named GAdsManager (see the reference guide here). “A GAdsManager object fetches AdSense ads and displays them on a specified map. Ads show up as GMarkers and can be clicked on to bring up the ad within the marker’s info window. The GAdsManager selects AdSense ads based on the current viewport and the surrounding textual content on the page.” More from Pamela’s post:

At Developer Day in May, we previewed GAdsManager, a class that would place contextual ad markers for local businesses in a special layer on your map and help you monetize it. We’ve now released the ads layer with the addition of GAdsManager in Maps API v2.85, and it’s ready for early testers.

I’ve put together a demo of the ads layer here: http://imagine-it.org/google/gmaps-samples/adslayer/adslayer.html

After loading that page and waiting for a few seconds, you should see a white marker show up-this is an ad in the ads layer. If you click on the marker, you should see the text and logo of this ad, for a hotel. If you pan to New York City, you’ll probably see another hotel ad show up. Since this feature is in its very early stages, our local ad inventory is small and you might notice that only a limited number of ads show up. As we roll out this program to more advertisers, we expect to see an increase in ad inventory and thus an increase in the number of ads that show up in the ads layer on your map. Currently, the feature only shows ads for businesses in US. Apologies to our (many) international developers, who can, however, still implement the ads layer in advance of international ad inventory becoming available.

The groups conversation on this topic includes some good questions:

• Q: Do I need an AdSense account to use this? A: Yes.
• Q: Is it available in Maplets? A: Not yet, but likely.
• Q: Is there a way to ‘tell’ or ‘hint’ what you want the ads to be about? The issue is, when it’s “just a map” there’s less textual context for Google’s AdSense algorithm’s to work from. A: Not yet, part of the concern is how to prevent gaming the system.
• Q: Can AdSense Channels be used to segment across maps? A: Yes.

With services like this and Lat49 it looks like there’s going to be increasing array of options for mashup developers to monetize their applications.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping, Money, PopularAllTime at 12:45 AM | 3 Comments »

June 27th, 2007

Digg Mashup Contest Winners

Digg has announced the winners of the Digg API Visualization Contest. You can read about them here on Digg. Ten finalists were selected by the contest team and then Digg community members used their diggs to vote for the winners. The winner? Digg City, shows the 10 newest popular stories. The more popular the story gets, the taller the building. When someone diggs the story a stick figure of that user is added. Figure goes inside the building he has just Dugg.

You can see the second and third place winners in our earlier coverage here and see the Digg API Profile here.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, PopularAllTime, Social at 12:26 AM | 1 Comment »

June 18th, 2007

Craigslist Blocks Mashup Listpic

In another dust-up over a mashup taking data by screen-scraping, the classifieds listings giant Craigslist has blocked access to its site from Listpic, a useful mashup that enhances Craigslist listings by adding-in associated photos. If you check our existing Listpic mashup profile you can see it has been a very popular application and is 5-star rated by our readers:

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law, PopularAllTime, Shopping at 12:10 AM | 7 Comments »

June 4th, 2007

Google Buys Mashup

Amid all of the API and mashup news last week between the Where 2.0 Conference and Google Developer Day there was another interesting tidbit of mashup news: the Google Earth team bought the Spanish geo-centric photo sharing service Panoramio. The service, started in fall of 2005, lets users upload photos and geolocate them on Google Maps and Google Earth. This application was one of our earliest ProgrammableWeb mashup listings back in 2005 and you can see our Panoramio Profile here. Below is a screenshot from the service back when they started:

Of course it’s much more than just a mashup and Panoramio has lots of useful features and a large, quickly growing community (over 1 million photos, 4 million monthly uniques, and 30 million page views — see this Alexa chart on their blog to view how fast they’ve grown). For some time now, Panoramio has been the default photo layer for Google Earth which in turn had a lot to do with this acquisition. A big congratulations to co-founder Eduardo Manchón and the Panoramio team. You can read more at Panoramio’s Q & A page and the Official Google Blog.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping, Money, PopularAllTime, photo at 1:03 AM | 5 Comments »

May 15th, 2007

7 Java Resources for Mashups

If you want to write mashups in Java these libraries might save you a lot of time. Just as with the 12 Ruby Resources we looked at last week, these resources can greatly simplify access to major APIs. Some are officially supported by the API providers themselves and others are independent, open source efforts.

• Facebook Java Client: Wraps the increasingly popular Facebook API. This library was recently updated in March.
• flickrj: A Java wrapper for the Flickr API.

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Posted by John Musser as HowTo, Java, PopularAllTime at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »