Mashups at Web Service Awards 2008

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Yesterday I had a presentation about Mashups at the annual Web Service Awards in Stockholm. Since there was a lot of webmasters and people working with big corporate web sites I focused of my presentation on what mashups can do for web site owners. Basically the two things I wanted to the listeners to get out of my presentation were:

  • Do not be shocked when somebody mashes up your site, it will happen if it hasn’t already. It is a great possibility for marketing your services and not a threat!
  • Use mashups to quickly create unique and usefull user experiences to enrich your web sites.

Here is my presentation (in Swedish only):

The presentation went very well and I got a great response to it. It seems like I did at least tickle the interest of the audience and at least some of them will play with mashups and hopefully all of them will see mashups as an opportunity and not something weird and dangerous. I think that Sweden is getting ready to embrase the Mashup wave.

You can find all the presentations from the Web Service Awards here, I especially recommend the usability presentation from Johnny Mellgren at Vinnovera.

Thank you to Richard Gatarski for inviting me to do the presentation and thanks to all of the people I queued with for the food yesterday 🙂

Predictions for 2008

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Since it is January it is more or less obligatory to write some predictions for the new year. Here are some of mine, they are not really any big predictions about major industry trends and world changing events, but I think that at least some of you might find them interesting:

  • Microsoft Live Search will be integrated into Facebook and the Microsoft-Facebook allience will start to seriously compete with Google for the search market.
  • Enterprise Mashups will be on the top of the hype cycle in the end of the year and big companies will start to seriously invest in it (and not just talk about it).
  • The Web 2.0 bubble will burst, but that really just means that some big famous companies will go bancrupt (bye bye Technorati). It won’t really have any similarities with the .com bubble, instead it will mostly be something created in the buzz obsessed blogosphere and then be writen about in mainstream media.
  • Microformats will be integrated into WordPress, Blogger, Flickr och other major sites, and be the basis for many interesting integrations and mashups.

Some predictions specific for Sweden:

  • There will be a lot of talk about mashups in Sweden, but not much action.
  • Schibstedt will try to make a Swedish social network – “a Swedish Facebook”. Be prepared for a major ad campaign.

You can find more Swedish predictions in the latest episode of the whatsnext podcast (sorry, swedish only).My last prediction is that Digitalistic soon will have a new design and a section all in Swedish, I really hope that I am not wrong about this one!