Wow. Myspace as the top site in terms of traffic. Looks like they’ll have the money to throw another nice party next year.
This should put another nail in the coffin (which is already FULL of millions of nails) suggesting you need nicely designed pages to be a great site.
Update. Jeremy’s saying that it is problematic to compare the entire Myspace environment with only pieces of Yahoo’s.
Wow, with a session title like that … you’ve got to love the internet …. or just replace it with acronym AIMMMMD
Review Microformats, which really clever people think are forming a key component of the new web.
Kevin Lawver with AOL is showing off some stuff at Aimcreate.com
AOL Module T: http://developer.iamalpha.com/profile/
AOL loves dojo
Use the module maker and it’s really easy to create modules.
Open web is becoming institutional, and that is …. good.
If you are reading my mashup posts you should ALSO be checking out these far better mashup info sources:
Programmable Web – John manages the holy grail of mashup info. He posts it all here.
Blogs of Mashup Maniacs. Or at least people who came to Mashup Camp 1:
Scott Isaacs – The Architect for MS Live .. remixing the web. The LIVE team remains impressive.
Mashups are not new, but the Mashup revolution – the low cost, richer services and experiences, allow us to build things like Zillow.com that would have been totally prohibitive without the backup infrastructure.
Millions of IM users – HUGE reach at NO cost. Cool.
Leverage your investments by remixing. Mashups bring traditional software development … to the web.
Windows live has internalized the Mashup philosphy – Windows live properties are … mashups. The LIVE experience is built out of gadgets. Will be turning gadgets ON in MS spaces. Build a great gadget and get the viral impact. [ NOTE – IMHO how users will populate their increasingly customized browser window with widgets/gadgets/toolbars/messeging/etc is the coming *key* battleground for the big players. Seems Yahoo and MS understand this better than Google? ]
Live Gadget Framework – 100% Firefox compatible. Not yet supporting Safari for technical, not philosphical, reasons.
Demo of Concerts Gadget – concerts + flickr pix. Scripts plus style sheets into gadget. Can derive new gadgets from the old ones.
Demo: notepad gadget
A performance advantage and challenge:
Life Cycle of the applications is NOT driven by refresh, rather by the application itself. Must “clean up after yourself” and get rid of gadgets after they are not used anymore.
Future Thinking:
Microformats – great standards for data transferability.
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Steve Milroy is one of the sharpest guys I’ve met in the mapping space. He’s talking about using MSN mapping in mashups via the Microsoft Live Local.
Windows Live Local Demos.
MS is licensing a national database of “birds eye” 45 degree angle views which are really appealing and can be embedded in the ap. Low altitude airplane pix. This is a great feature that (i think) Yahoo and Google do not have.
VE control is integrated with MS Atlas controls.
19 view levels, from street to above earth. Easy to geocode using ?
Geo RSS = very cool. If a blog or post has geo tags, you can then use VE to integrate that location-specific content with your map. I talked to Steve about this yesterday as it would be a killer approach if people were tagging their blogs with locations. Unfortunately they are not, but I’m thinking maybe Blogger , Typepad, WordPress et al shoud at do a basic auto-tag of the blog with geocoded info showing the city location of the blogger. This might be helpful in several applications that reference blogs and blog content.
MapCruncher – easily create layers and add them into mashups. This is COOL. Take floor plan and click to match with Virtual Earth points of reference. Then you can allow the user to navigate outside and *inside* the building. What a great way to show a Univ Campus map or navigate large, complex buildings.
MS is “investing heavily” to make this the best of breed mapping application.
Philosophy: “What it’s like there”
Streetside preview. (slow on this connection) Streetside is very cool as it allows a “drivers eye view” of Seattle and ?. Of all the stuff at Microsoft’s MIX06, streetside was the thing that got the big response from the crowd.
——– not part of Steve’s presentation —-
Nice comparison of Yahoo, MSN, Google, Mapquest, Ask mapping from CNET.
Mapbuilder.net is a neat place to make simple maps *really* easily. They were at Mashup Camp 1 and I think will be here tomorrow.
Mapping Anecdote: Homestead, where I’m staying, printed out Yahoo Directions for me from there to the museum when I asked them for directions. Cool! Yet due to geocoding or some other technical glitch Yahoo had me turning left rather than right when I reached my destination. Not cool. but I’m not complaining – these are simply great yet evolving technologies.
deCarta, formerly Telcontar, is talking about mapping mashups. Check out their developer zone.
Client side mashups as the “main approach”, with pushpins on locations in your data set.
They are experimenting with many advanced applications and these complex data mashups tend to be better run as server-side.
Map as picture vs map as … data. Customizing how the map is drawn is a new developer tool and a valuable one. Map for a game would have different look than the same map for a driving tour.
Given the very high quality of Google, MSN, Yahoo maps I’m not clear if they won’t become yet another victim of the giant .coms sweeping away early niche adopters, but hopefully they can remain competitive with free offerings to developers as here.
Mashup University continues…
I’m a bit late but after a double espresso at the Microsoft sponsored coffee cart (THANKS MS!) I’m listening to Peter Burris with IPswap a clever service that is seeking to help people create, buy, share, and manage digital services. I’ve missed most of his talk so go see the site.
The Higgens Trust Framework is very promising way to standardize personal information for use across multiple platforms. Yikes – that sentence means I must be writing from Silicon Valley. If I was in Oregon I’d say it “tells programs who you are”.
I tend to agree with those that think filling out yet another form is a barrier to participation, though the upside of such things is that they provide an incentive to make sure the content / program you are signing up to use is worthy of your time and attention *before* you sign up. Will this openup a new plethora of junk applications just fishing for clicks?
Today CNN’s online video headlines:
True, they did include some info about the Korean Missile launches and Israel’s attack on Gaza, but as usual left out the tolls from global catastrophes like malaria and HIV.
Is it presumptuous of me to suggest that American news is becoming a mental garbage dump? Ironic that it’s us and not the networks that are to blame. Networks just put out stories that attract our attention, and for the most part those stories are not reasonably interpreted as news.
The World Cup has been fun to watch and here is a great little chart at the FIFA website with tournament standings and upcoming game times. I think I’ll root for England because it’s time we all get over those tax problems of the 1770s.
The Globalist points out that international sports events are now signficant at a macroeconomic level, and that World Cup 2006 should add about 5 billion euros to the German GDP this year. Their 2002 article was more interesting in terms of itemizing both the benefits to co-hosts Japan and Korea and the potential costs which included the *drag* on the UK economy if England made it to the final and people slacked off at work to watch their team. Clearly, soccer sports quite an economic kick.
Joe Duck 