October 2nd, 2007

20 Car Mashups: Search, Shop, Race

Are you shopping for a new or used vehicle? Want a convertible? Interested in professional Formula 1 or NASCAR racing? There may be a web mashup of interest to you in our listings of 20 mashups tagged “cars”. Auto-related applications are good fodder for mashups because they often involves collecting data from multiple sources, like for comparison shopping and using local classifieds. Maps come in handy for some apps in order to mapping vehicle locations nearby or to see races and racetracks around the world. Here’s a few of note:

• Formula One Grand Prix Circuit: Displays all Formula One Grand Prix Circuits raced from 1950 to 2007.



• Motor Map USA: Search all autos for sale on eBay with this mashup of the eBay API and Google Maps. If you need that rare Shelby this might be the way to find it.



• Find a Convertible Car: Uses the Google Base API to let you search for convertibles in the US by make, model, year and location. Results are plotted with the Google Maps API.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 1:56 AM | 1 Comment »

September 7th, 2007

12 Firefox Mashups

Firefox has become a very popular development platform and it’s no surprise that some of the hundreds of developer-built extensions are using third party APIs like those listed here. As of now you can see 12 Firefox mashups listed here at PW. Some worth checking-out include:

• Shareaholic: The most recent addition to our listings, this Firefox extension allows you to submit the webpage you are viewing to digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, and other places. It also tells you whether the webpage you are on has been dugg and commented on, and how many times it has been saved on del.icio.us.



• FireUploader: This is a Firefox extension which allows you to upload, and download photos,files and videos using a user friendly FTP like interface. In this version Flickr, Picasa, Box.net and Youtube are supported.



• A couple of extensions use web service storage APIs like the ones we profiled yesterday to make file storage straight from FireFox simpler like the S3Fox Organizer that’s similar to the FTP interface that lists local folders in the left panel and Amazon S3 buckets, files and folders in the right panel
• BlueOrganizer: Handy extension that uses a lot of open APIs. Concisely described by Michael Calore of Wired: “Turns your right mouse button into a jumping-off point that leads to dozens of web services. Right-click on a word, a product, a company, a person or a link anywhere on the web and the add-on will give you a context-sensitive menu full of ways to learn more about and do more with whatever term you’re interested in.” (And one of our earliest ProgrammableWeb sponsors)



• BumbleSearch: Another extension to integrate the web more directly into your browsing experience using 6+ APIs including the BBC API and the Technorati API.
• PhishTank SiteChecker: Checks the current website you are on against the PhishTank database. Blocks the page if it is a known phish. Available as an extension for Seamonkey, Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and IE and Opera as a greasemonkey script.

If you’re aware of other Firefox extensions using third-party APIs you can let us know in the comments here or at our Add a Link page.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 1:39 AM | 14 Comments »

July 27th, 2007

5 Mashup Contests on Now

If you’re interested in the chance to win cash and prizes for creating mashups then check out our Mashup Contests Page. At the moment there are 5 mashup contests under way with prizes up to $10,000. Keep in mind that 2 of these end next week:

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 2:30 AM | 7 Comments »

March 7th, 2007

Visual Shopping with Mpire

What do you get when you use APIs to mashup retail shopping, auctions, analytics, reviews and coupons? For the VC-funded startup Mpire, you get a very useful set of shopping tools, what they call a universal shopping experience. They’ve used APIs from providers like Amazon, Shopping.com, eBay, Yahoo! Shopping and others, taken that data and analyzed about 10 trillion transactions, then provide shoppers not just the usual comparison search but also tools like historical price trends so you can see them over time. Somewhat akin to what Farecast does for travel. Here’s an example of price trend analysis for iPods:

Read the rest of “Visual Shopping with Mpire” »

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 1:05 AM | 3 Comments »

February 11th, 2007

200 Photo Mashups

Of all the hundreds of tags you can see in our mashup tag cloud, the second most popular behind “mapping” is “photo”. How popular? As of now there are over 200 photo-related mashups listed at ProgammableWeb — 202 by today’s count.

Also, you may not be aware that there are 14 photo-related APIs. The vast majority of the photo mashups listed, about 80 percent, use the terrific Flickr API. Others mashups have been built with the Fotolia, ImageLoop, and Smugmug APIs.

A number of the all-time most popular mashups are photo mashups. For example, one of the all-time Top Ten includes Flickr Sudoku, that lets you play sudoku puzzles using numbers from Flickr images.

Speaking of diversions, Spell With Flickr lets you interactively create ransom-like words using Flickr photos.
Read the rest of “200 Photo Mashups” »

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Yahoo, photo at 10:26 PM | 2 Comments »

January 19th, 2007

See the Mashup Camp Winners

Yesterday the Mashup Camp attendees reviewed over 15 entries in the mashup competition and placed their votes for the best mashup. And the two top prizes went to:

• The Hype Machine: An experiment by Anthony Volodkin that keeps track of songs and discussion posted on the best blogs about music. First prize: a nice new laptop courtesy of Intel.



• tourfilter: Use tourfilter to rack as many bands as you can think of. Listen to thousands of MP3 and RealAudio tracks by bands with upcoming shows. Browse recent music blog listings. Get updates via RSS, iCal and email.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Events, Examples at 5:10 AM | 2 Comments »

January 17th, 2007

Best New Mashups: MyBlogLog, Flickr, YouTube

Continuing from yesterday’s summary of notable new mashups, here are a few more worth seeing:

• Adding Tags to MyBlogLog: Here is a fun little hack with MyBlogLog, the addition of del.icio.us tags. You will be able to tag your visitors and immediately see what you and others have had to say. When your readers click a tag they will see instant inline search results for users.



• The American Image: Photographs of John Collier Jr.: An online exhibit exploring the work of John Collier during the war years of the 1940s. Flickr mashups are used to pull in photographs making up the Collection and one of the interactive activities.



• ZonTube: See Amazon music with YouTube videos. Useful site. Cleanly implemented.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:05 AM | 2 Comments »

January 16th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Alerts, SaaS, and Pets

Now with 1,452 mashups listed, it’s time for our regular review of some of the more notable new and interesting mashups added to ProgrammableWeb. Most of this set have some degree of utility value depending on what your need or interest is: keeping your web site running, keeping up with terror threats, or finding lost pets and valuables.

• Alerter for Pingdom: Need to know ASAP if you web site is down? This useful mashup provides you with a Windows system tray icon that shows the status of your Pingdom checks like websites and servers. .NET source code available.



• Salesforce.com Events Calendar: Keep abreast of upcoming Salesforce.com events with this integrated Google Calendar. Notable for being an example of one SaaS service provider using the API of another SaaS service provider.



• Global Incident Map: You might be surprised to see just how many terror threats or incidents happen every day. Includes airport, chemical, bridge, railway, bomb and other incidents. With links to related news stories and searchable database. You’ll either like or hate the retro-style flashing map markers.



• The Found Bin: TheFoundBin.com is the largest online collection of free, map-based lost and found listings. The site allows owners and finders of pets and valuables to post lost and found items for free.

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

January 9th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Videos, Time, and Pols

2007 is off to a good start on the mashup front given the variety of new ProgrammableWeb entries. New ones include video mashups, utility mashups, and tools for keeping an eye on US politicians. Overall there are now 1432 mashups and 356 APIs here.

• ZonTube: Nice combination of Amazon music with YouTube videos. Useful and cleanly implemented. A Bob Dylan example.



• Congressional Travel Maps: View where your congressperson has traveled, how much it cost and which private interest paid for the trip. Part of the OpenSecrets.org Congressional travel database.
• Qlock: Sophisticated world clock for browser or desktop. Hover over cities in every country to see the current time. Daylight map included. Can be integrated into your own web site.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 1:59 AM | 1 Comment »

January 2nd, 2007

Best New Mashups: Visualization and Celebrity

It has been a few weeks since we’ve looked at the new and interesting ProgrammableWeb mashups so it’s a good time for an update (last roundups are here and here). For whatever reason there was good variety over the holidays. Here are some:

• TuneGlue: Slick interactive visualization of the relationship between music artists built with the Last.fm and Amazon.com.uk APIs.



• FlickIt: The FlickIt web service uses the Flickr API to dynamically generate thumbnails of anything.
• Are You an A-List Bloglebrity? A Technorati-powered widget that determines the celebrity list status of a blogger. Enter your blog URL to see how you rate.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 9:04 PM | 3 Comments »