mashup

The need to Mashup Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku

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I have some friends on Twitter, a couple on Pownce and Jaiku is the platform of choice in the swedish tech sector so I am getting into Jaiku as well (I am “andreaskrohn” on all of them). Which platform you use depends on what technology you prefer and where your friends are. I don’t really care about the technology at the moment, I just want to keep in touch with my friends (yes I know that Pownce API kicks Twitters ass and that Twitter goes down more than an intern in the Clinton White House, but believe it or not, I prioritise friends over tech). These are 3 different platforms, each trying to be a community. But the community of any one person will not live on one platform, unless that platform gets to be either completely dominant or the technical platform providers takes a step back and let the community live across providers. The latter has happened with telephone services (you can call friends with a different cell phone provider) with email (i can mail people that are stuck on Microsoft Exchange from my Gmail) etc etc. I can not wait until this happens to the microblogs!

It is quite easy to post to several microbloggins services at once. Jaiku does a great job of importing RSS feeds, so posts to Twitter or Pownce can easily be imported to Jaiku. Via Twitterfeed it is easy to get an RSS feed into your Twitter as well. I haven’t found any easy way of getting an RSS feed into Pownce. Also there are apps like Twhirl that let’s you post to all 3 platforms at once. In my case I also use the Twitter Facebook app to get my tweets into my Facebook status and I am looking for a way to do the same with LinkedIn (no success yet). So posting cross-platform is not a problem, even if it means that you need to do some configuration and that all your posts gets trippled or quadrupled.

Reading friends posts from several platforms could also easily be done. I could of course go to all the different services and read each posts on each one, but since I want to do other things with my day than that I would rather use services like FriendFeed or SocialThing that aggregates it all into one place. FriendFeed imports from most sources and have some nice comment features, but the UI really desperatly needs a designers touch. SocialThing imports from just a few places so far (please please add RSS now!) but I still prefer it to FriendFeed. These services and others make it easy to see your friends posts from several platforms in one place. What is missing is a way to naturally post back to the microblogging platforms from these services.

What is needed, and what will come very soon I am sure, is a mashup of all these microbloggin platforms to allow users to be active on several platforms at once all from one place. I would like to see an app that allows me to interact with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku completely. This means reading other peoples posts, replying to posts to have a conversation going cross-platform and posting to all platforms at once. Since all of the platforms have APIs this should be possible to implement (and for all I know it already exists somewhere, if you know of such an app please let me know through a comment on this post!). This would be a great mashup that would breach the community silos that exists today. Short of everyone moving to one platform a mashup is the best answer to this problem.

Btw, I have some extra SocialThing invites so if anybody wants one please let me know via a comment on this post.

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.

The Evolution of Mashup Development – From Hacking to Assembling

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The current trends are more that business users gets more abilities to solve their own problems and for programmers to give the business users the tools to do so. There are some tools like this already that are very popular (see Explaining Enterprise Mashups), but we have only seen the start of this development. These trends will change the roles for both programmers and business users in fundamental ways and it is interesting to see how that could play out. This is one likely scenario of what will happen during the next couple of years.

Yesterday
Programmers were building applications and integrations by programming. There were very little finished modules to reuse and combine, so a lot of logic had to be written from scratch (most talk about code reuse is nothing but talk). This was not only Mainframes and Cobol, but also a lot of Java, C++ on Windows and Solaris etc.

Now
Programmers building applications using ready made modules. These modules might be full applications, libraries or, in some cases, widgets. This means that less logic needs to be written from scratch (Apache Jakarta projects have changed the lifes of most Java programmers for example).

In 1-3 years (early adopter geeks today)
Programmers and early adopter business users are assembling solutions using ready made components. These solutions are called mashups today, but are probably not going to have that name in a few years, instead the “mashup style” of solution development are going to have become mainstream and be a natural part of applications (just see how mashups are built with Facebook Applications today). The components are widgets that have been developed by programmers to function as building blocks in bigger solutions.

In 3+ years
Business users are assembling solutions, programmers are building widgets.

From Hacking to Assembling
Of course there will always be programmers that are programming low level solutions like kernels and compilers (at least those are low level to me) and business users that just want their problems solved without them having to deal with any technology. But overall the focus for programmers will go from building the solution to building the building blocks (aka widgets). For business users the focus will go from waiting for a program that solves their problem to be developed to being able to assemble a solution (aka mashup) that will address their problem. Overall the focus will move from hacking to assembling.

Great Tools for Business Users Needed
This means that business users need to be more aware of what building blocks are available. Currently there are a few early attempts to develop systems to handle this – IBM’s Mashup Hub is a good example. Furthermore there is a need for easy to use systems for business users to combine all those widgets. This is probably the hottest area in mashups right now, with everyone wanting to be in on this – BEA Pages, IBM QEDWiki, PageFlakes and iGoogle to just mention a few. But so far it has been with very limited success and just a little more than proofs of concepts or cool AJAX playgrounds. Let’s see what will happen in 2008, I for one if looking forward to seeing new cool innovative solutions to these problems.

Facebook as a Mashup Container

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A Mashup is according to wikipedia a web app that combines several data sources into one experience. Thinking about it that is exactly what millions of users do everyday on Facebook using the Facebook applications. Basically every application is a widget that is running in the Mashup Container Facebook. Each widget can interact with the world around it. So far there is no direct application-to-application communication that I am aware of, it is all via the Facebook infrastructure. But still each application can have access to your personal data as well as some data about your friends. This probably makes Facebook (one of) the worlds most widely used Mashup Container in existance today.

iGoogle and other widget platforms are not Mashup Containers in my definition until they allow the widgets to interact with the world around it. A widget that just sits there and does it’s little thing (like showing me the weather in my city) without being able to commuicate with the platform or other widgets is much less usefull than a widget that is part of a whole ecosystem. With OpenSocial Google, MySpace, LinkedIn etc are quickly becoming Mashup Containers in the same way as Facebook.

This is all very interesting because it means that millions of people are using Mashups every day, even building Mashups every day, all by using Facebook applications. How many of those people even know what a Mashups is? That means that Mashups are all among us already, but they are still undercover, much like aliens in some low budget sci-fi movies from the 50’s (“Plan 9 from Outer Space” rocks!).

Growing Pains: Mashups for Phising and Spamming

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One thing that was clear from Mashup Camp in Dublin was that Mashups are still not mainstream, even if they are creeping closer and closer. John Herren made an interesting comment in his Introduction to Mashups presentation at the Camp, and that was that we will know that Mashups are about to be really big when the spammers and phishers start to use them. So far the spammers are concentrating on email, wikis and blog comments, but maybe the next step is Mashups. I am not sure how that would look, but I can imagine that the ability to combine services quickly would fit phishers quite well, especially if the internet users in general are not aware of those possibilities.

It will be interesting to see how this will look like and how it will impact the Mashup tool vendors and Mashups in general. Spamming and scamming is part of growing up for all internet technologies (arguably for all communication related technologies) so let’s see how Mashups will handle the growing pains.