Jul 19
This is my first MashupCamp. I was really excited to be part of it this year, as the last couple have sounded great from my readings online, and what mates who went tell me.
Although this is the first year, it feels different. How has the life of a mashup changed?
- Vendors: There are lots of vendor presentations. This doesn’t feel very campy. Instead of the “this is how I did this, here are the warts, here are the work arounds” you get “If you use my product you click on this button and it all works! Ta da!”
- Voice: A surprising amount of the content has involved voice mashups. Who knew?
- teh social: The Zune has spread the word so well that the concept of social networking in mashups was covered a lot (don’t make me say jk wrt the zune)
- Violations: Half of the mashups shown violate end user agreements. For example, Kapow shows off taking a Google search page, swaping out a Y! logo, and stripping out the ads on the results. Bzzzt!
- Screenscrapers: I have used Dapper before, and was impressed. It worked well for my use case. However, how much of a use is there for screen scrapers? I was talking to Gregor Hohpe about this. If you are the type of content that wants to share its data, you will probably have a feed. If you are the type of content that wants to monetize itself directly, you will not have a feed, and you will not want someone to scrape you.
- Pamela “I have won lots of Mashup competitions” Fox had a good point about how the term mashup is losing meaning. If we define a mashup as “If your application uses an API to another application” then almost everything she does is a mashup.
I am still looking for some more energy at the show, and for a really great, useful mashup.
It has been nice to meet up with people like John Musser and beating the afore mentioned Pamela Fox at Guitar Hero (note the 100% score. Sounds better than it is as it was on medium only):
