Category Archives: Science & Technology

Mashup Camp 2 – Brain Pain, but the good kind

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Mashup Camp 2, day 1 wraps up with  here at the Computer Science Museum.

Despite some good presentations, I think the Speed Geeking Session was the best part as in Mashup Camp 1, but it seemed the mashups in the competition are not quite as strong though there are several good ones and I only saw about 15 today.  David Schorr’s   WeatherBonk, which almost won Mashup Camp 1, is back and better than ever.   He’s got GolfBonk as well which is very clever.   The best viral marketing idea was a mash of maps and myspace called Frappr.com

Frucall‘s callback with shopping data was neat and Intel’s up to some great stuff with their shopping mashup that takes a *picture* of the UPC and fetches shopping data.     Also strong in this space SecretPrices.com

Some of these are too complex to digest, especially on the tiny screens some people were using to show off their applications (Marc, dude – you call that a screen?!) But his PeopleAggregator roll your own social network looked really promising in many ways.  Yobie’s online mega shop GoodStorm.com also needs a lot more than 5 minutes and has very powerful features.

Mashup Camp 2 – search session

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Dorai Thodla of IMorph led an excellent search discussion this morning about the challenges of bringing more context into the search results.   He’ll post at the WIKI this afternoon.  Google noted that their new API is allowing a lot more integration and flexibility than it used to, and I think Yahoo is moving in this direction as well where the commercial use distinctions are breaking down in favor of … innovation!  Hey, innovation is a good thing.

But in my opinion the most interesting development in all in search is the Amazon Web Search platform which Jeff will be talking about this afternoon.     From my perspective Amazon is basically going to aggressively enable modest potential search competitors with big time search infrastructure.

Even if this fails to bring any great innovation to the table, I think it’s already helping to suggest that Google and Yahoo should continue to bring good APIs to the table and encourage search mashing.

Myspace is number one. Who’d have thunk it?

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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.

Mashup University – AIMPages Module Microformat and Module Development

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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.

Mashup University – MapQuest OpenAPI

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Mapquest is up next with Antony Pegg and Joe Hughes.

Most popular mapping site on web with 50 million unique users per month, 1.25 billion page views (wow). More mapping than all competitors combined. Top 10 internet brand.

Mapquest Business Solutions.

OpenAPI. Mapping, Geocoding, and routing in a single API. Sounds great. But commercial limitations sound like they may be restrictive? As with all map providers you should talk to them if you have great commercial aps – they generally like to see innovations more than apply restrictions to developers. Integrated into AJAX style scripting interface.

Shows a great icon set for plotting data points.

Joe Hughes is up now with demo of the “Load Remote” feature of the API using a service side module with third party traffic feed.

ChefMoz/Mapquest demo with restaurant listings plotted with opening times.

Move developer tools and demos:

mapquest.com/openapi 

Speed Limit – won their API contest: Betimely.com

gamedaymapping.com

company.mapquest.com/samples/index.html 

Mashup University – AIM Developer Program

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Greg Cypes is Sr. Software Engineer at AOL, AIM Core Infrastructure.

If you build it they will come. AOL is opening up to developer community.
AOL is interested in openness.

AIM Developer SDK Triton plugins, AIM Custom, AIM bots

DEMOs of some bots developed using these three approaches.

With AIMCC the bot infrastructure is provided, developers focus on business logic. Rock/Paper/Scissors mashup bot demo.

AIM location services. MAC address asso w/ location so AIM can give approximate locations. Not used to specifically track a user, rather router location.

AIM Web Services and BIG. BIG’s getting deprecated but won’t be turned off.

I’ve missed much of the technical aspects of this presentation so…. AIM developer stuff

AOL developer info 

Greg’s blog

AIM Acronym list

Mashup University – AOL Digital Media Services

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Spencer Huang with an excellent presentation about AOL Music Now. This is the first developer discussion of AOL’s premium music service which offers a la carte and subscription based full access to 2 million songs. Download them all if you want. Transfer to player.

All dynamic programming lists exposed as RSS XML 2.0 feeds. Can be top level feeds or member specific. Feeds

Next up are the guys from AOL Winamp project:

Winamp**   Built on Community Development.  Demos of some mashups using winamp and demo of SHOUTcast = AOLs Roll your own Radio Station and put it in this directory.  This looks very interesting.   At lunch the AOL guys were saying that overseas adoption of Winamp is very high.

Winamp Developer Network

** Ha – it’s a small little internet world?

Mashup University – Microsoft Gadgets and AJAX.

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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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