Mashup Camp 2 – Google Gadgets

Posted on July 14, 2006 by JoeDuck

Adam’s talking about Google Gadgets and how powerful they are as a mini content distributor. They are easy to create and are attaining huge usage worldwide. Adam and his team have done a super job of making this fast, easy, and fun. Good google! This is dynamite stuff, and in typical Google fashion they have made it easy, fun, and open.

The Gadget directory is algorithmically generated so the most popular gadgets tend to rise to the top as they are selected by users. Don’t be evil helps define decisions virtuously rather than GoogleOptimizably. Engineering constraints trump marketing ones.

GoogleModules.com and hotmodules.com (these are NOT Google sites) are good sources of inspiration and gadgets.

Translation is easy by having a few lines translated, the upload as a country specific gadget.

Top author? 16 year old Caleb from Arkansas. Countdown gadget is his top and he has several.

Design: Minimize brand unless you are really big where it’s a value adding feature.

Hyperlink at bottom for more info

Hyperlink in title

Promote gadget on your own site (add-to-google button)

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 1 – wait, there’s more!

Posted on July 13, 2006 by JoeDuck

The excellent unconference format makes the entire conference something of a networking session. Still, it’s great to have a few beers with folks who make the internet … so darn interesting.

I always enjoy talking with the brilliant Adam Sah who brings plenty of Google gadget enthusiasm to the mashup mix and I’m sure will have some great stuff to show us tomorrow during the last session. Also really enjoyed meeting mashup and housingmaps.com legend Paul Rademacher (whoa – not to be confused with this Paul Rademacher, who is dead).

Paul’s early mashup of Craigslist and Google maps (before there was a maps API no less!) helped usher in the notion that mashups are a very useful, great way to mix data in innovative ways. Had a great chance to talk about some travel mashing ideas with Adam and Paul. There’s a hurricane of real time road data at the transportation departments but it’s non-trivial to pull even a fraction of that in effectively. Mashups to the rescue? Maybe.

Also got to meet the famous ex-googler blogger Mark Jen who was fired by Google for … blogging! He works over at Plaxo now where he won’t get fired because … he wrote the blogging policy! Very nice and sharp guy.

Mashup Camp 2 – Brain Pain, but the good kind

Posted on July 13, 2006 by JoeDuck

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

Posted on July 13, 2006 by JoeDuck

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.

Mashup University – Microsoft Gadgets and AJAX.

Posted on July 12, 2006 by JoeDuck

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.

————

Mashup University – Windows LIVE

Posted on July 12, 2006 by JoeDuck

Dan Thorpe is introducing Windows Live.

What is Windows Live? It’s a HUGE user base. [also I think it’s MS’s noble attempt to catch up and ride the Web 2.0 wave]. It’s Windows Live Services.

Developer Center

Hotmail 240 million
Messenger 230 Million
Spaces 130 Million users

Wow!

The internet has evolved into a social mechanism centered around….”me”. Your life is about relationships first.

MS want to create a virtuous ecosystem that mutually benefits users, developers, advertisers, and MS. Sounds virtuous to me…… the MS Big Happy Family Paradigm.

Hertz – Hertz via Hotwire = $206

Posted on July 7, 2006 by JoeDuck

Hats off to Hotwire.com where I just booked my BWI rental car for more than half off the rate quoted moments later at Hertz. 8 days for $200 vs $406 at Hertz.com. Note that at Hotwire I did not get to choose my car company – I just specified my dates and car type. But who cares about the company? I’ve rented from most of them and had similar and mostly positive experiences.

The 200 is a fantastic rate. I’ve been looking for a few weeks, mostly using Kayak, and have seen mostly prices in the $300 range. I think the lowest I found at Kayak was 276 and today it’s about 300, so Hotwire really came through for me.

The moral of this story was “if at first you don’t get cheap, try, try again”

Top Online Advertisers for May 2006

Posted on July 7, 2006 by JoeDuck

Vonage, Dollar, and Phoenix Online University top the list of the top 100 May online advertisers who spent a whopping $245 Million for online advertising. I’m not clear how this compares to the online ad spend total as this leaves out the mom and pops who buy a lot of adwords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

You don’t need a degree from Phoenix Online U to say “Wow, that’s real money dudes!”.

The Wired 40. Yahoo as the “McDonald’s” of Cyberspace !?

Posted on July 3, 2006 by JoeDuck

Wired Magazine has named their top 40 “wired” companies. The selection sounded a bit vague and trendy to me but lists are fun. Wired says this is how they picked them:

We start by looking for the basics: strategic vision, global reach, killer technology. But that’s not enough. To land a spot on our annual Wired 40 list, a business also needs the X-factor – a hunger for new ideas and an impatience to put them into practice.

Notable points: Google at top of list, Apple second. Yahoo at number 5, the “McDonald’s of Cyberspace” (!?), Microsoft 36th.