mashup

Impressions from Mashup Camp 4

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Mashup Camp is an unconference about Mashups and everything related to Mashups. This was my second Mashup Camp, last Mashup Camp was in Boston in January and it was a brilliant event. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people and it opened my eyes in many ways. Last week Mashup Camp 4 was in Mountain View, California and again I meet great people and had some interesting discussions (check out some photos here) But something was off, maybe too few people, maybe not the right people, I am not sure. Maybe it was just my high expectations, maybe it was that I couldn’t attend more than the last day (Camp is 2 days, with a prequal 2 days of Mashup University) or maybe the competition of other events meant that not enough people attended. According to David Berlind (one of the organisers) they will go back to having the Camp early in the year, which I think is a good idea.

Some highlights
Chime.tv stole the show in many ways. Joost and others are trying to create the next generation television experience, but I think they missed something extremely important, and that is all the content already available on the internet. You might have heard of a small site called YouTube, and there are also a few other video sites out there (and by a few I mean 1000s and 1000s). Chime.tv is a great site that allows you to watch all these videos without having to go around to all the different video sites and without having to load each individual video yourself. The videos are shown back to back creating a channel with continous content. Either use some of the premade channels or make your own by searching for whatever you are interested in from whatever site you are interested in. Definitly the coolest site I saw at the Camp, a brilliant use of all the videos available on the internet. They have built a great video site without having to host videos or have to worry about all the bandwidth the videos are eating up. Check it out, I am a total chime.tv junkie already.

Some other highlights were

  • KarmaGeek – a try of leveraging all our Geek knowledge for the benefit of Non Profits. Still very early days (started at the last Mashup Camp), but it has real potential.
  • Google Mashup Editor – a cool mashup building tool aimed at developers. It requires some coding, but the results I saw where impressive and the coolest thing is the easy integration of other Google services such as Maps.
  • Apatar – a very interesting open source project building a way to create workflows between different applications and databases.

Early early days
It is really clear after this Camp that these are the really early days of Mashups. Even at Mashup Camp there are many people that are trying to figure out what this Mashup thing is all about. There are some attempts to do Mashup tools and frameworks of different kinds. BEA Pages and IBM QEDWiki are a couple from the big boys aimed at Enterprises, Google Mashup Editor, Teqlo and Bungee Labs are a couple aimed at the consumer market. I am happy to say that Kapow Technologies is in the forefront of the Mashup wave, a good place to work right now. We are spending a lot of time thinking about Mashups and where things are heading and so far we seem to be on the right track (f you haven’t checked out openkapow.com yet then please do so now). I am looking forward to following Mashups as they develop and as it starts to be accepted (and maybe even a requirement) inside big companies. It is clear that Mashups are growing up and are becoming more than just an excuse to use Google Maps (more about that in a later post).

Hope to see you in Dublin
Next Mashup Camp will be in Dublin in September. I hope I can go to that one, it will be really interesting to see what people will come to an European Camp (it will also mean a shorter flight and no jetlag for me, which would be nice for a change). A Camp fuled by Guniess should be fun!

5 Top Tips on How To Be Cool in a Web 2.0 Crowd

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In the 50s a black leather jacket, smoking, pink cars and greasy hair was cool. None of that will get you far in a Web 2.0 crowd. As in all crowds only very few acctually knows what they are talking about and the rest are faking it (I am not, I promise, I really really belong!!!!). The trick is of course to sound like you know what you are talking about, and the rest does not matter that much (that is good old Marketing 1.0 or How-to-survive-High-School 1.0). Just follow the 5 tips below and you will be considered cool by any Web 2.0 crowd. A bit of a warning though, it won’t get you chicks and the chances it is going to land you a job outside of Sillicon Valley are slim to none.

1. Know when to be new school and when to be old school
Adobe Apollo is now named Adobe AIR, where AIR stands for “Adobe Integrated Runtime” (this means that the name includes Adobe twice, what a great feat or marketing!). Right now the correct thing to call Apollo is AIR, since that shows that you are hip to what’s happenin’ (forgive my non-techie slang here, it might be a bit out of date). However, in a few months when Adobe throws all it’s marketing might behind the name AIR, you should once again start using the name Apollo. That will show that you are old school cool and don’t care about marketing dollars. From new school to old school in a few months, that took Hip Hop years to achive.

2. Social X 2.0
Use the word “social” and “2.0” for everything, it does not have to make sense. These buzz words of the day will soon go out of style since all kinds of uncool Media 1.0 are talking about it, but for now it is the in thing to use. It is a bit like the Dilbert mission statement generator, just take an existing term and add Social in the start and 2.0 in the end and voilá, you’re cool. For example “Social Work 2.0”, “Social Search 2.0”, “Social Latte-Grande-with-an-extra-shot-of-expresso 2.0”. To be extra cool you might wanna start mentioning “Web 3.0” – it is such a badly defined term that it can be used for anything from the full semantic web to the latest improvements on Flickr, very practical.

3. The Power of the T-Shirt
T-Shirts have worked well for many generation of Geeks. Power of the Sys Admin is displayed by the wild beard, the pizza built body and, most importantly, the dirty and worn “Linux Rules” T-Shirt. ThinkGeek has built a good business on this fact, and Threadless is doing the same thing for the “damn I am creative, I have a Mac and I understand the inside joke” crowd. Everyone has blogs (at least everyone that will read this), everyone has accounts at the lastest cool sites, but not everyone has the T-Shirt from just that event. The Social Events 2.0 (yay, I got a cool point there, see how easy it is) now has unique T-Shirts where you can add your own little personalization sentence. That was the thing both at the Web 2.0 Expo a at JavaOne (bonus tip: mention the events you’ve gone to lately) and it was really popular. T-Shirts can show the pure mortals that have only read about Web 2.0 in Times Magazine that you are a hard core Geek 2.0!

4. Use a Mac and make off-hand comments about it
This is not as complicated as it sounds. It involves using a Mac, but you have to keep from making the blank-eyed-freaky-smile-all-with-Mac-is-wondeful-and-Steve-Jobs-is-my-God statements all the time. Instead just happen to mention every know and then how great that latest Mac utility you found is and how much time is saves when you do [insert technical babbel here]. For extra coolness just end the sentence with mumbling a bit about “or maybe you don’t have a Mac…”. A given is to just happen to mention how great a Mac is to use when you are using Ruby On Rails, that is 2 coolness points for the price of one.

Disclosure: I don’t use a Mac (but I do own a fully working Mac Classic II)

5. Get in on those Beta programs and use them as if you were Social Machiavelli 2.0
Register for all beta programs you can, the earlier the better, they are the currency of Economy 2.0 (to really beat the 2.0 analogy to death). Once a beta has been mentioned on TechCrunch your hard work will have paid off because you can just happen to forward to article to your “friends” (term used loosely), of course via Jaiku (Twitter is soooo over), and mention that you do not agree with what Michael Arrington is writing (bonus tip: dont refer to TechCrunch, refer to Michael Arrington, this buys you some cool) and you should know since you have tested the mentioned app for a few weeks.

By the way, I have a Microsoft Popfly beta account and I don’t agree with whatever Micheal Arrington is writing about it!.

A Cry for Help
Let me know if I have missed any key points. I am soon going to Mashup Camp to talk about Social Mashups 2.0 and comparing that to Microsoft Poplfly and, what is then called Adobe Apollo, so I need all the help I can get!

Overview of Mashups – Concepts, Technologies and what it all means (my JavaOne presentation)

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Sun has now uploaded the transcripts and audio from my JavaOne presentation about Mashups earlier this month. Both the PDF of the presentation, the audio and the transcript can now be found at the SDN’s JavaOne site. You need to be a member of the Sun Developer Network (SDN) to see it, but membership is free so don’t let that stop you.

The official title of the presentation is “Integration Gets All Mashed Up – Bridging Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Applications”, and it is an overview of what mashups are, what technologies are involved and how the different components fit together inside a mashup. It was a lot of work getting the presentation together, but it was well worth it since I got a lot of good feedback from people (thanks to eveybody that came and heard me speak!).

The presentation starts out with the standard (= Wikipedia) definition of mashups and then move on to describing the enabling technologies such as REST, JSON, Atom and RSS. Of course all this is from a Java perspecive since it is after all a JavaOne presentation. Next are the components of a mashup such as Mashup Builders, Widgets, Mashup Enablers and how they all fit together.

Inside a Mashup

Next I describe the the mashup programming model, which is a lightweight programming model that means that the focus is on assembling and not coding. In the end I highlight what it means to be a developer in a mashup world.

If you are in too much a hurry to go through the presentation I can give you the summary right here:

  • Mashups are all about
    • Building a situational application ad hoc
    • Reuse and remix both data and funcitonality
  • Using Mashups means that
    • You can do more in less time
    • You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
    • You are not in total control of how your applications and data will be used

If you are interested in Mashups I hope that this presentation will give you a good overview. Please take a look and a listen and let me know what you think!

What I learned at JavaOne 2007

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I am just back from a week in San Francisco at JavaOne where I was one of 12.000 geeks that got together to get to know more about the latest and greatest in Java development. Since it was almost 2 years ago I worked full time with Java development this almost felt like a trip back in time for me, back to the time when Java was equal to my professional life, and what I have worked with the last few years (Web 2.0, mashups, web scraping etc) is still considered new and exotic in the Java world.

It was also very interesting for me to compare JavaOne with the Web 2.0 Expo that I attended a few weeks ago. JavaOne is almost strictly for developers that are using a mature technology that has not really taken any real leaps lately. The Web 2.0 Expo was for both techies and business people and it looking forward at new technologies and business oppertunities.

Keynotes and General Sessions
Most of the Keynotes and the General Sessions were also about running Java on all kinds of devices (cell phones, ATMs etc) and generally about how great Java is, so nothing new there. But there were a few things that caught my eye:

  • JavaFX Script – Sun has decided to take up the fight with Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash, unfourtunatly they decided to give it a name that most people will confuse with “JavaScript” and Adobe’s “Flex” (just try saying JavaFX Script 10 times quickly). This is a very interesting move since it suddenly makes it easy for the whole Java community to develop Rich Internet Applications. This and Silverlight has the potential to make the web a much more interesting place.
  • Netbeans 6 – There was a quite impressive demo of Netbeans 6 and how it can be used for programming Ruby on Rails, much better than RadRails I am using now. Of course it was a demo and I havent had time to test the Netbeans 6 preview yet, but as soon as I have to dig down into Rails again Netbeans is my choice.
  • Blu-ray – There was some semi-desperat plees (=competitions) to get Java developers involved in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD fight. Sun is squarly behind Blu-ray (they mentioned that it ran Java about 100 times). The Blu-ray demos were cool, but personally I just want one format to win quickly so I know what player to buy.

Java and Web 2.0
Most of the presentations were of course about hardcore Java stuff, and I skipped those. Instead I went to all presentations about Mashups, RSS, Atom and REST (acctually I held a presentation about Mashups myself, more about that in a later post). It is pretty clear that all the Web 2.0 technologies are viewed as some distant hype by most of the Java community.

The only really cool thing I saw in regards to Java and Mashups was a couple of demos of jMaki. It is a project developed by Sun and it is basically a framework where java developers can easily program Mashups. The great thing was what is called the “Glue” which is an event bus that enables widgets from different providers like Yahoo and Dojo. jMaki has a great future if it ever moves into the Enterprise world and it could be a real step forward for both Java and Web 2.0.

Another interesting Sun research project is Project Caroline that enables java developers to control all resouces from the code, ie create new server instances on the fly, set up new file systems etc etc. If this ever moves beyond just being a half implemented research project it could open up to a lot of competition for Amazons S3 and EC2.