Mashup Camp Dublin
I was at the opening day of the 3 day Mashup Camp event at the Guinness Storehouse yesterday. It was a very late decision to go, because I was late finding out about it and we were only confident of being able to attend for one day. Somehow, I managed to sacrifice my precious Saturday morning lie in and make it there almost on time!
Mashups are basically about taking data from 2 or more different sources, and making something new from it. Similarly to how you can mash 2 songs together and come up with a surprising result, lots of people take information available from multiple websites and make something interesting. There are lots of great examples at Programmable Web. I have never made a mashup myself, but I think it’s a cool idea and it was always something I meant to find out more about when I had time. So it was a good opportunity to get up to speed yesterday.
IBM spoke about their QED Wiki application and other software that facilitates non-programmers in making business mashups. You can download the IBM mashup starter kit with all the software. Martha Rotter from Microsoft spoke about Popfly which is aimed at the social end of the spectrum. You can easily display your Flickr photos, Twitter updates etc in novel ways and then easily share that info with other Popflyers or on Facebook etc. I find the mashups in between the hardcore business and social extremes to be most interesting – ones that have interest to consumers, but have a purpose beyond eye candy. For example, I love JustRoutes, which maps public transport routes for Dublin. Unfortunately, I missed the talk on OpenKapow, but I’ll defnitely be checking that out. While more and more sites are developing APIs, screen scraping is still the only way to get data from so many more. Scraping can be a major pain, and OpenKapow makes that much easier – good stuff!
The key point I learned from Mashup Camp was that there are lots of free user-friendly tools around now for making mashups quickly and easily. From the little I knew about Mashups before, I thought that it would take specialist knowledge, and often substantial time, to get a worthwhile mashup up and running. The opposite is true. I heard the term “situational apps” again and again yesterday. Whenever a situation arises where it would be helpful to have certain information to hand that is not currently available from one source, you can knock up a mashup in a matter of hours to meet this need. The only time consuming bit is finding the data that meets your need. Once you have the information in a suitable format, assembling a mashup takes minutes.
There are general and business mashup contests on as part of Mashup Camp. Before I went, I never considered entering as it’s an area I knew next to nothing about. But I left thinking that if only I had a decent idea for a mashup, I would give it a lash. Far from being sole the preserve of developers, mashups are open to anyone with an idea.
