May 9th, 2008

4 Spy Mashups - Watch in Realtime

If you want to see in realtime what’s going on Digg you can use their digg spy page. This popular Digg feature uses a dynamic Ajax UI to let you see diggs as they happen. And now it serves as a model for a growing number of mashups that use web APIs to give you a realtime window into activity on a variety of services. Here are four from our mashup listings:

• Two good ones from the team at Ajaxonomy are TubeSpy (mashup profile) and del.icio.us Spy (mashup profile). TubeSpy shows the videos being watched on YouTube as they are being watched and del.icio.us Spy shows you the newest bookmarks added to del.icio.us and also letes you filter links and share the bookmarks.



• FlickrSpy - the Flickr Peepshow shows you what’s uploaded right now (more details at our mashup profile).




• Digg Comment Spy (mashup profile): Track live comments posted to Digg. Blue posts are replies to the top thread, yellow are replies to another comment.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Video, Visualization, photo at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

April 18th, 2008

Follow the Oil Money

Did you know that George W. Bush received $2,649,725 in oil contributions is his 2004 election campaign? Or that in 2008 Rudy Giuliani received $659,158, John McCain received $291,685 and that Barack Obama received $163,840? These and other bits of political trivia and insight come from a useful site that was recently Mashup of the Day: Follow Oil Money. The very well done and enlightening service is subtitled “tracking petroleum industry campaign contributions.” It draws from over 8,000 contributions from 6000 companies to deliver a rich set of tools for searching and visualizing where the money comes from and who it goes to.

As co-creators Greg Michalec and Skye Bender-deMoll describe:

We’ve created a map of the political campaign contributions from companies in the oil & gas industries to politicians who are candidates for federal office. This is a relationship map of the contribution network. That means that unlike a physical map, where points are positioned at a geographic location, the icons for the companies and candidates are placed so that they are that they are as close as possible to whomever they contribute to or receive contributions from.

Another way to imagine it is like a molecule: the companies and candidates are like atoms, and the contributions are like atomic bonds. Or, one can think of it like the popular websites Facebook or MySpace, in which companies and politicians have become ‘friends’ by giving money.

Data comes from a variety of sources including the Sunlight Labs API, the Democracy In Action API, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Center for Responsive Politics, and GovTrack.us. Skye provides more background on his blog.

The developers even let you know what tools they used to build it: MySQL, PHP, Graphviz, and the script.aculo.us and TableKit ajax libraries.

For more on government-related APIs, mashups, and news (like Tracking Money and Politics), check the Government API and Mashup Dashboard.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Gov at 2:45 AM | 1 Comment »

April 4th, 2008

Seesmic Acquires Twitter Mashup Twhirl

As reported at TechCrunch, the popular Twitter client twhirl created by German developer Marco Kaiser has been acquired by video chat service Seesmic. Besides the Twitter API, it also uses the Pownce API and the Jaiku API to allow cross-posting messages to those services. It is a very popular and very useful client that will have an interesting future. For more background on the acquisition, Seemic’s Loic LeMur gives 20 reasons why they acquired it.

On a related note, acquisitions of mashups is becoming a mini-trend that we’ll report on in more detail shortly.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Money at 1:49 AM | 2 Comments »

March 20th, 2008

Semantic Web Mashups and Freebase

Want to see who influenced who in history? From Duchamp, to Freud, to Voltaire, to Einstein and others, yesterday’s Mashup of the Day, Free Influencer, is one semantic web style way to see these connections. While the database of people appears to be just a small starter set at this point, the concept is promising.

This mashup is one of the first mashups we’ve listed built on top of the relatively new Freebase API. The Freebase service, from Metaweb Technologies, is “an

An open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.

By structuring the world’s data in this manner, the Freebase community is creating a global resource that will one day allow people and machines everywhere to access information far more easily and quickly than they can today.

It was founded by Danny Hillis and Robert Cook from Applied Minds, and with $42 million dollars is well funded. Tim O’Reilly earlier wrote that Freebase Will Prove Addictive:

What Metaweb is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.

Now, the really powerful thing about this is that all these categories, these data types and the web of fields that define them, provide new hooks for applications that will be able to extract meaning from the data. That’s what makes Metaweb a kind of semantic web application.

Free Influencer describes itself as “a web site where you can search and discover people and more particularly their influence in a people network. All people, influence relationships between people, the descriptions, pictures are defined in Freebase, an open and shared database. As Freebase is open, you can add or modify any information, like for instance influence network.” Given that the data set is small at this point, their help page encourages users to add to the data set in Freebase.

Since Freebase is a much more structured information store than Wikipedia and is Creative Commons licensed, over time we may start seeing a lot of interesting mashups built on this service.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, SemanticWeb at 2:18 AM | 1 Comment »

February 29th, 2008

An API for World Time

There are many sources out there for getting global time and timezone information online. Now there’s an service getting local time anywhere in the world from the small startup WorldTimeEngine, a service which is both a mashup as well as an API. Their basic web site centers around a search box where users can search on names and geographic locations like “india” or “10 downing street, london” or “51.50, -0.126236″. The result of the search is itself a mashup that shows a the location plotted on a Google Map along with a variety of time-related data like timezone, UTC/GMT offser, DST, and geographic coordinates. The example below is from our mashup profile:

Their RESTful web service API returns the local time in an XML data structure based latitude and longitude coordinates. You can view more details in our WorldTimeEngine API profile. The API is available for commercial use via a subscription model at £72 per year (and it’s one of the first APIs we’ve seen where you can buy usage on the spot using Google Checkout).

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Mapping at 1:43 AM | No Comments »

February 26th, 2008

Environmental Activists Discover Mashups

In her recent article “Using Web2.0 tools for Environmental Activism”, Global Voices Online writer Juliana Rotich looks at how environmental activists are taking advantage of modern Web tools to share information and raise funds. From blogs to services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, the Web is becoming an important channel for spreading news and information about environmental issues. And mashups are no exception.

Environmental Mashups

Environment-related mashups cover a broad spectrum of topics, including pollution, hurricanes, climate change, industrial activity, and “green” hotels. There are currently 24 mashups tagged “environment” and 13 mashups tagged “green” on ProgrammableWeb.

The Climate Change 2030 mashup presents data from the Architecture 2030 study of climate-induced rise of sea level for coastal United States cities. You can select a city and view an image of the city today and a corresponding image of the city showing areas that would be flooded after a forecast rise in sea level.

Environmental APIs

As we covered earlier, Green APIs are coming and today we have two environment-related APIs in the directory: the AMEE API, the Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine for CO2 data and calculations, and the CARMA, Carbon Monitoring for Action, is a massive database containing carbon emissions data of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide.

Making a difference and going Green

The Greenspace UK Carbon Emissions Map and UK Carbon Footprint Project graphically illustrate UK carbon emissions data and provide ideas for minimizing your own emissions. The Air Travel Emissions Calculator (shown left) and Carbon Emissions Compute mashups enable you to evaluate the impact of your US air and automobile travel. The Green Hotels mashup helps you find hotels that employ environmentally-sensitive policies.

There are many other interesting and informative environment-related mashups, including the LA Times Wildfires Map, the EPA Superfund Site Locator, Planet Hazard, and the Find Pollution Map mashup. To our benefit, more environmental mashups are being created all the time.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as BestMashups, Green at 2:22 AM | 3 Comments »

February 22nd, 2008

New Mashups via Pownce, Twitter, Technorati

What happened on the Programmable Web this week? Besides the 8 new API listed there were also 34 new mashups that in total used 31 different APIs. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Powncified: This is the first mashup listed here built using the Pownce API. Powncified tracks the most popular links that are sent publicly on Pownce each day.



• popuri.us: A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking from Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc., social bookmarks like del.icio.us, subscribers on Bloglines, etc. Built using the Alexa Top Sites, del.icio.us, and Technorati APIs.



• TwitPic: This app lets you share your photos on Twitter. Uses the Twitter API and Flickr API.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 1:33 AM | No Comments »

February 18th, 2008

TwitterLove: Applying the Social Graph API

Want to visualize someone’s “following” list on Twitter? Thanks to this creative application of the Google Social Graph API you can. Even though Social Graph API was just released a couple weeks ago it didn’t take long before creative developers began seeing ways to put it to use. And as you can see in our TwitterLove profile the application uses 2 other APIs including the Twitter API to create a timeline and the Japanese service SimpleAPI.net to create thumbnails.

For a bit of insight into traversing through the social graph, developer Ko-Ji described to us his application flow using his own id of ‘fkoji’ as the example user to lookup:

1. Send an initial request to http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/lookup with arguments callback=loop&q=fkoji&edo=1
2. In the callback we look for “types” in any “node_referenced” nodes returned (where “types” are “me” or “contact”).
3. If type is “me”, then we have a starting point URL for this person.
4. If type is “contact”, then we push the node to a contacts array.
5. If contacts array is not empty, then we send a request to social graph api again with a query of contacts twitter urls.
6. In the callback we do the same process as above and if we find “fkoji” in their contact, we know they are contacts of each other, so we put a heart icon.
7. We use the SimpleAPI.net service to get their thumbnail images.

You can also get more details doing a View Source on the TwitterLove HTML.

Update: In the comments ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick points to a very slick mashup from Kent Brewster: BlogJuice. It uses the brand new MyBlogLog API and a variety of other services and tools (like Yahoo! Pipes) and “looks for a MyBlogLog identifier on the page you’re on, and uses the MyBlogLog API to dig out information about its reader roll”. Read Kent’s post for lots of details with a live example with his own site, and see Marshall’s coverage here.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Google, Social at 12:13 AM | 3 Comments »

February 14th, 2008

Mashup for Printing Public Domain Books

One of the more unusual mashups add to our listings lately is our entry for Public Domain Reprints, a non-profit service that lets you take public domain books on sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive and print them on Lulu.com. The service combines APIs from a few of these services like the LuLu API and the Internet Archive API as well as the EC2 API for hosting. It’s a fairly straightforward but useful service. As creator Yakov Shafranovich describes on his blog:

1. You request any public domain book from the Internet Archive.

2. The book is processed and submitted to Lulu, a no upfront fee print on demand company.

3. You can order the printed book from Lulu at cost (almost, a small under $1 fee is surcharged to cover cost of conversion servers rented from Amazon EC2).

There are a lot of titles to choose from with over 200,000 public domain books on the Internet Archive and 1.5 million on Google Books. For more, their FAQ goes into some details and Philipp Lenssen recently did an interview with Yakov over at Google Blogoscoped.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 1:33 AM | 1 Comment »

January 24th, 2008

Use Bury Recorder To Watch Digg Buries

Another interesting mashup added to our listings recently is the Digg Bury Recorder which is built on top of data pulled from Digg Spy. For a bit of the why and how, creator David Hurth at Ajaxonomy gives this introduction:

If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don’t know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can’t just track data for a particular story.

In this case you give the application the story’s URL and click “Watch for buries”. An Ajax UI automatically refreshes to give a dynamic history of all buries for a given story. In the background the server code fetches and parses JSON data from Digg Spy every 20 seconds to get the updates. One added bonus with this application is that it’s open source so you can download the code, see how it works, and if so inclined create and host your version.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Code, Social at 12:43 AM | No Comments »