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LOLCatService – the most pointless web service ever

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I have just launched the most pointless web service ever constructed – LOLCatService.com. It is a REST Service that allows you to search for LOLCats in an easy way so you can embed this absolutely crucial feature in your web apps and mashups. The very idea of it is so pointless that I just had to implement it.

It all started at Mashup Camp 5 in Dublin where I built openkapow robots on request during speed geeking (basically speed dating for demos). Tom from Yahoo asked me to build a LOLCat REST Service and that was such an utterly pointless and stupid request that it stuck. So this whole service is of course pointless, but it is so pointless that it is cool.

The cool part of the service is that it literally took me a couple of hours to do it all, including writing the openkapow robot and building the site. The most time consuming part was to wait for my domain server changes to propagate.

WhatsNext intervju från MashupCamp (sorry folks, Swedish only)

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Tidigare idag så snackade jag med Tomas Wennström från WhatsNext om vad som pågår på MashupCamp i Dublin just nu. Gå till WhatsNext och lyssna själva eller lyssna direkt här. Det är väl värt at lyssna WhatsNext fär att hålla sig uppdaterad om vad som händer i Sverige vad gäller webben.

Sorry folks, this post is in Swedish only since I am being interviewed by a Swedish podcaster in Swedish. More aboutMashupCamp in English later…

Reading the Social Graph – you are defined by your friends

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Ankur Shah and Gi Fernando from the UK web development company Techlightenment had a brilliant presentation at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin – “Disrupting the Platform: Harnessing social analytics and other musings on the Facebook API“. Techlightenment is the company behind the widely spread Bob Dylan Facebook application, so they know what they are talking about. In these days it is enough to have worked with something for a few months to be an expert, so after 4 months with the Facebook API makes the Techlightenment guys into gurus.

Facebook vs. OpenSocial
The Facebook API was compared to the OpenSocial API. There were quite a few differences, but what caught my attention was that it takes 60 lines of code in OpenSocial what it takes 2 lines in Facebook using the Facebook Markup language (FBML). In general it seems like the OpenSocial API’s are quite imature so far and that Facebook will keep ahead with it’s aggressive constant innovation for quite a while. Still, go for both Facebook and OpenSocial if you are going to do an app. If the social platform war will stay limited to just two standards we are quite well of …

You are defined by your friends
In addition to the information you explicitly have defined, like your age and if you are married or not, there is a lot of information about you that can be deducted from your list of fiends. Are most of your friends from London? If so there is a good chance that so are you. If most of your friends are working in the banking industry then there is a good chance that you are as well. This information is of course worth a lot in the hands of an advertiser that can target the ads to the right people. Now with Facebooks new Social Advertisting initiative that makes it possible for them to target ads to Facebook users even if that user is on another site than Facebook this kind of information is worth even more.

Techlightenment have developed a cool Facebook application called Socialistics that on-the-fly makes best guesses about a person based on their friends. It is a really interesting proof of concept of what can be done. Install it yourself and see what can be deducted about you based on your friends. The more friends the better guesses of course, but it is amazing what can be figured out about you. The power of these kind of statistical analyzis will explode in the near future, which is going to make both Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys more money.

Who am I according to my friends?
Using the Socialistic app I get the following data about myself. I most likely live either in Stockholm (I did for years) or in Mexico City (not a bad guess since I do spend a lot of time thre), there is a 10% chance I have worked for Microsoft in Copenhagen (wrong) and I most likely took my university degree at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City (I have studied spanish there for all of 1 hour once, but that’s it). The good stuff is that there is a 65% chance that I am a man (just that I work with IT should bring that number up to at least 90%) and that I am from Sweden (guilty as charged)

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According to my wife I am a social outcast since I only have 28 friends on Facebook. If the name calling I have to take out a Facebook divorce (ie “cancel relationship”), after all it is 28% chance that I am single already.

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Adobe Flex is on fire

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Marco Casario from italian Comtaste had a good presentation at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin today comparing Adobe Flex to JavaFX, Lazlo, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX and XUL (full name of the presentation is “Choosing th Final RIA Path or Choosing the Appropriate RIA Technology”). In this comparison Adobe Flex won both on the level of maturity, size of active community, small learning curve, multimedia features, usability and spread of the Flash plugin that now reaches 98% of internet users. Of course your choice of technology depends largely on the specifics of your project, but this is another indicator that Adobe Flex is on fire.

Flex & AIR
Adobe Flex is a way to easily develop Flash programs. It is based on MXML and when compiled Flex code becomes a Flash .swf file. That means that it can run in any browser that has the Flash plugin installed. What I really like with Flex is that you can write the frontend in Flex and then use whatever language you want for the backend. Using REST services in Flex is super easy, so as long as your backend can talk REST you can connect to the frontend that way. I like this idea since I would prefer PHP for the backend of whatever app I do since it is widely supported, have a very active developer community and there are lots of PHP programmers all around the world.

AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime (formerly Apollo, see my “How to be cool in a Web 2.0 crowd” on tips on how to use this fact to increase your geek coolness) and it allows you to develop desktop applications using Flex or HTML/JavaScript. AIR applications can run on most platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux etc) and can access local files etc just like any other desktop app. The fact that it is now simple to write platform independant desktop applications using only HTML/JavaScript is really powerful.

Adobe MAX
About a month I was at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago. Since that is where all Adobe-fanboys gather there were quite a few Hallelujha moments, and maybe I am somewhat influenced by that. One thing was clear from MAX though, Adobe are pushing Flex and AIR with all it’s marketing might. After having an almost 100% market share on software for web designers (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc) they are now really focusing on the web developers. They are doing a great job making powerful tools that makes development a charm, their Eclipse based Flex Builder is one of the best IDE’s I have used.

Mashups & Flex
Building Mashups in Flex is easy since the REST support is really good. I had a presentation at Adobe MAX dealing with the need for mashups and webscraping in general and combining Kapow Mashup Server and Adobe Flex in particular…

Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure – my Web 2.0 Expo presentation

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Right now I am in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo. The sessions here are brilliant but the general organisation and the exposition hall are not impressive (but I promise not to rant more about that). More about the sessions in later posts.

Yesterday I had a presentation about Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure that you might find interesting. It deals with Mashups in general, mostly from a perspective of improving the productivity of knowledge workers. I also list the 4 types of mashup projects as well as some real-life customers that use Mashups in these ways:

  • Opportunistic Applications (Audi)
  • Repurposing (Deusche Post)
  • Web Automation (GMX)
  • Data Collection (SimplyHired)