Mashups and Twitterlicious

Mashups are the craze these days, and this week was Mashup Camp in Mountain View. What's a mashup? Basically, it's a fusion of different data sources to create a web application using public APIs. Mashups before were started by the geeky developers. The first type of mashups were those based on Google Maps API, like for example, there is a mashup of TTC stations that are mapped in Toronto. In a way, just like open-source software where people tinker with the code and modify it, mashups are in a sense open-web applications, they really open up the web, and the sky is the limit as to what type of applications you can write.

Now apparently, the big businesses are getting into the game, especially the big three of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google has something called Google Mashups Editor that allow you to create mashups visually in a GUI interface on the web. It's in beta and right now is only limited to a small number of developers. Ever since Google started with Google Maps, they've been speedily enabling desktop applications on the web, like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Gmail. Yahoo also has a mashup tool called Yahoo Pipes, check out my blog entry about that. Of course, it was inevitable that Microsoft would have a mashup tool (they always come late into the game in almost every new product, but in the end do give a run on the competition). Their mashup tool is something called Microsoft Popfly.

What is Popfly? It's a catchy and cool word. Basically Popfly is a way for non-developers to easily create web applications without having to write code. It's only by invitation only as it's in Alpha. You have to click a button to join and then if you're accepted, you'll get an e-mail back to allow you to login. I did that last week. I haven't really went through the time to test Popfly, being busy with the PhD and finishing writing up the camera-ready of a conference paper. Hopefully, I'll be able to test drive Popfly.

So anyways, back to MashupCamp. Here's a pretty neat mashup, it's called Twitterlicious and as you might guess it uses Twitter and del.icio.us. What it does is that you can browse Twitter feeds on your phone but since it's difficult to browse URLs associated with Twitter posts, you can create clips of the URLs as del.icio.us bookmarks which you can view later on your PC. A video of this is shown here from MashupCamp.

On Technorati: mashup, twitterlicious, twitter, mashup camp, del.icio.us, Popfly

Facebook opens site to developers

Facebook has now opened its site to developers. What does this mean? Developers can add Facebook functionality and tools to their own web site, essentially tapping into the Facebook social network and community. I think what this will lead to is 'social mashup', adding social networking features to web sites and make web sites more 'social'. Web sites don't have to create their own social networking tools and features, when they can use Facebook. It will be interesting, perhaps there might be a logo on a web site that says "Facebook certified", or "Facebook approved", or "Facebook enabled", or "Facebook compatible". I believe this is the start of creating an open social networking platform for the web, and in essence, "socializing" the web. Perhaps, using Facebook on a web site, is a way of creating and maintaining a sense of community part of my PhD research.

On Technorati: Facebook, social web, social mashup