Alexia Blogs

Day three of today’s MashupCamp is done and dusted. My favourite part of the today was the speed-geeking. I was paired with Damian Bannon and Will Knott. I like to ask questions, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to get around and ask folks about their mashup wares.

Out of all of the mashups on show, I was particularly impressed with John Herren’s Indeed.com job search mashup and Dennis Deery’s farm field mashup. Incidently, they came first and second in the Best Mashup contest. Congratulations to all of the prize winners.

Thanks to David Berlind, Doug Gold and the rest of the MashupCamp team for organising the event. Thanks to the sponsors for supplementing our attendance, to presenters for being patient and answering every query, to Mulley for getting the word out and to the attendees for turning up and making it a good weekend.

I’d like to see this event grow and grow into the future. It needs more university presence, more local devs, more designers, more hobbyists. More. MashupCamp is coming back to Dublin next year. Let’s make it more.

Some takeaways from day two:

1. Users are an important part of the mix. APIs are just about leveraging data, but having an immediate audience ready to use your mashup. Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft all see this. Hence intimate integration with their consumer offerings.
2. Broadcasting is a big driver (AOL, Yahoo). Status updates from IM-style applications aping the infamous Facebook status updates - ‘here I am, this is what I’m doing’.
3. Performance is a big issue. Anything to increase the efficiency of how mashups are delivered is invaluable. Creative hosting solutions like using souped-up Content Delivery Networks and/or end-user performance tweaks like caching make pages serving rich content easier (Yahoo). Better for users and better for the bottom-line of the Mashup maintenance spend. Long-term thinking for businesses looking to get into this space will breed more opportunities for consumer and enterprises down the line. We’re already seeing in the big boys get in the game building large data centres around the world all prepared to serve up Content De Jour.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been inspired by a group of mixed-skill folks, like I have been at MashupCamp. Each and every group contributes to this Mashup stew.

There’s the business-heads focussed on ROI, seeing the fruits of harvesting enterprise and web data. Those that hail from humanities who come with a sociological tilt. The hackers who splice data sources apart, see how they work and think that there is no box. The beginners who are scrambling to digest the syntactical grace of JavaScript and PHP, while trying to stay on top of the big picture. The infrastructure and tool providers helping all in sundry to achieve and excel in their sphere of web apps.

All enthusiasts. All eager to listen, learn and teach. All loving the beauty of recycling our information to make a compelling, situational offering for end users.

Day one of MashupCamp 5 was an absolute delight.. So many buzzwords, technologies and points of discussion. Some of my takeaways in short-form with the thought-provoking presenters in brackets. My thoughts/questions in italics.

1. Content is king. Your mashup is nothing with good data (John Herren, Dan Gisolfi & Andreas Krohn). How much more data is out their waiting to be monetized and how can enterprise mashup enablers capitalize on this market? Yes, Kapow has a web harvesting tool, but what about enterprises that still depend on heavy backend systems? What are other providers doing in this space?
2. RSS is a big driver for mashups.. Some of the best mashups depend on it (John Herren& Dan Gisolfi). I like this idea. RSS may billed as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, but it enriches our online streams immeasurably. There’s still?talk of ATOM vs RSS. From today’s presentations, IBM are talking about ATOM as it’s more descriptive. Is this the Betamax wars of mashup feed technologies?
3. Seeing the potential in visualizing data from dispersed sources across spacial, timely or graphical views makes a mashup a winner (John Herren). Are there emerging models for visualizing data in different use case scenarios??For example, human beings like to visualize stats as graphs. What trends are we seeing mashups move in the future to become a more ubiquitous and natural part of our web habitat ? Can our research leaders predict where mashup UIs will be in five years time?
4. Mashup devs are only scratching the surface of social networking mashups. This has two effects. Privacy will become a bigger issue as more of our lifestreams are scraped (John Musser). The fast adoption of social networking could trigger a gold rush of mashup development. Will this be a bubble?
5. No matter what your skill level is - you can make a mashup. (Martha Rotter) Mashups are universal. It’s a democratic way to share the collective knowledge of the web. Even if you have zero experience you can use Popfly- in this case, you are not going to win a prize for creativity, but you can make a Popfly app all of your own and use it on Live spaces or in Facebook .

Any fellow MashupCampers have opinions here?