On 10/08/2007, at 3:56 AM, Annalee Newitz wrote:
subtle but helpful. Do you happen to know which, if any, of these
companies are welcoming mashups by providing open APIs or other
access?
You may also like to have a look at:
www.360cities.net
As far as mash-ups go, they seem to be the cool/hot thing of the
moment but I can't really see it going anywhere.
The technical basis of mashups is piping from several sources of
information, like Yahoo! Pipes!, but that form of programming (like
LabView) has severe and critical limitations. All forms of graphical
or piped information will (and do) bog down at the point where an API
fails to have the functionality needed.
Have a look at the current set of available Pipes on Yahoo's website,
and you'll see they're all really light-weight or quite useless
combinations, and there's no prospect of them really getting any
better than that due to the limited amount of functionality that
comes from that programming approach.
The existence of mash-ups appear to be a secondary side effect from
companies wanting to embed advertising into their data and then have
that advertising appear on other people's websites. The other side is
people wanting to access that data, but they're not free to use it as
they would wish.
For example, Everyscape, MapJack, 360cities all use Google Maps, but
they're unable to integrate the map into the view as they are only
allowed to embed Google Maps as a complete widget rather than
directly manipulating the data itself. This will continue being a
problem with all mash-ups.
If you ignore the crappiness of my experiments, you can see how
georama.com.au/sa tilts and rotates an aerial map for a more
immersive environment. I was forced to purchase that map in order to
have the rights and permission to do that, whereas I couldn't do that
with any mash-up data.
Since mash-ups are so hot, I expect that some people in this group
will disagree with my observations, and that my opinion wouldn't be
widely shared... however I think I will be more correct than not over
the longer term. :)
Steve.
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