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Goodbye Kapow and thanks for all the fish

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As of May 1st I am no longer working as Product Manager at Kapow Technologies, instead I am now an “independent internet professional” which is just a fancy way of saying that I think I can make my fortunes by myself. I have worked for Kapow during the last 3 years, and it has been a great time. It’s a company with a great product, great people and a great future. However, Kapow’s future doesn’t match up with what I have planned for my own future.

Now I will concentrate on creating something of my own, and I will be sure to keep you in the loop of what that is. Of course it will involve mashup technologies and remixing data, as that is what I am good at. Also I think that there are good possibilities to spread the word of mashups in Sweden, I have already done some of that, for example at the Web Service Awards last year in Stockholm.

So… Goodbye Kapow and thanks for all the fish, but now it is time for me to live the life without paychecks but with endless possibilities. Part of that life is making Digitalistic.com looking better, something that I hope you have already noticed. Thank you very much to Kemie at Monolinea.com for doing a much needed upgrade of the site!

How to market your APIs and your Mashups

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Last week I was at Mashup Camp 6 in Mountain View, my 4th one so far. One of the discussions at the Camp was about how to market your mashups, and that got me thinking more about the subject. Here’s my rant about how to market your API or your mashup that resulted from my latte induced and lack-of-sleep fuled thinking. Since there are, by definition, several components to a mashups there are also several levels of marketing. The first one is where the API provider needs to market the API to developers to they start to use it. The second one is where the mashup developer needs to market their mashup to the end user.

The API Provider
You have this great service that lifts humanity to a new level, makes the sun shine brighter, makes TV sucks less and give the gift of limitless bandwidth to the people (or at least it is really cool). You have even added this great API, now what? How do you get developers to start using the API and spread the word of your great service to everyone and their grandmother?

Well, let’s back up a bit. First of all, do you really have a great service? If you do, then do you really have a great API? Without a product people want to use there is no need to go through the hassle of promoting it. Make sure that the API actually is usefull for developers, that it will enable them to do cool and usefull stuff easier than if they would just hack it all together from scratch. Also make sure that there are plenty of documentation, examples, code snippets etc for the developers to get their hands on to minimize the barrier to entry. Hack together some mashups yourself with your API included in the mix, to give people and idea of what can be done. The key to get an API used by developers is to get the developers excited about the possibilities and get them talking. So give them something to be excited about and something to talk about.

Once all that hard work is done then you can promote your API via directories such as programmableweb and webmashup so that developers can find you. If you have made your own example mashups, then go through the steps below to market that, that is a good way of getting some recognition.

Last, but not at all least, show some love for the developers that has taken their time and built something using your API. Have an example gallery where they can list their creations. Blog about them. Talk about them at conferences. “Link love shall be bestowed upon those who link love showeth”.

The Mashup Developer
For the developer of the mashup there is Google AdSense money on the line, or maybe just recognition from peers. Most mashups result in web pages anyway, so make sure to do all the SEO stuff – have good page titles, have a good copy, have validating HTML, have a sitemap available etc. If there is money down the line for you then also throw some money at advertising (Google & Facebook makes this a walk in the park). All this is standard, but as there are differences between mashups and a regular web page you should also use that to your advantage.

What APIs do you use? What tools have you used to piece things together? Explain how you made your mashup, what the moving parts are. If you used Yahoo! Pipes, then link to the pipes used and explain how they were done. If you used Google Maps (and if you are a mashup newbie then I guarantee that you have, just admit it… “my name is Andreas, and I am a Google Maps addict”) then explain how. If you used openkapow robots, then explain how you developed them. Since API providers are suckers for traffic, just as everyone else, it is not unlikely that they would be interested in adding your mashup (assuming it kicks-ass, which of course it does) to their example gallery. All this creates more link love, more Google baits and really increases the chances of your mashup being found and appreciated by fellow developers. Another plus is that all this also increases the chances to be blogged about, do not forget that bloggers are suckers both for traffic and content.

There’s both money and recognition in entering your mashup in a contest, see programmableweb for a good list of what you can enter right now. You might not have to redo the mashup from the ground up, just add another API to the already great mashup you have made and you could already be a winner. If you go to Mashup Camp you could enter the traditional Speed Geeking (like speed dating for mashups basically) and go home with a shiny new Macbook.

Of course also list your mashups in directories such as programmableweb and webmashup , but by now you should know that already 🙂

Thanks for everyone that discussed this with me at Mashup Camp! For the notes from this session check out the Mashup Camp wiki.

32% knows what Mashups are, only 1% have implemented Mashups

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Every year Web Service Awards asks hundreds of Swedes online randomly about their knowledge about different trends on the internet. In the report coming out in February they have asked people about Mashups for the first time. 32% of the peopled responding have heard of Mashups, compared to 93% for blogging and 81% for RSS. Of the people that knows something about Mashups the level of knowledge is divided like this:

  • 7 % had very good knowledge of Mashups
  • 13% had good knowledge of Mashups
  • 12% had some knowledge of Mashups

Even people that knew nothing about Mashups apparently follows what happens, since 41% are following Mashups. On the other end of the spectrum only 1% of the people responding had acctually implemented and evaluated Mashups (they didn’t ask me, so I have no part of that lonely percentage). I am looking forward to seeing next years Web Service Award numbers, hopefully Mashups have become more mainstream by then.
Richard Gatarski on weconverse.com has a more detailed report on the different questions and answers in the poll.

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!