2005-10-24

Web API mashup matrix

www.programmableweb.com was a nice place I'm most certainly going to hang around once in a while to see what web APIs people toss together to create new and innovative applications -- an inspiration feed, since some of those marriages are really good. I liked Panoramio, for instance, a well designed site that easily lets you geotag your images and browse the world for local photos. (I especially liked how they bound the mouse wheel to zooming the big google map field; something I had planned to dig into at some time that never happened. Good thing I won't have to.)

Adactio Elsewhere was another really stylish page, which doesn't as much marry different APIs as put them under a common roof, quickly tabbed through. The RSS reader looks nice; I wonder if it's a local production or some borrowable feed API service; it looks much nicer than the (also often rather sluggish) Google Reader interface. Not suggesting they solve the exact same problem or use case, but it's a very neat way of bringing RSS feeds closer to something I've been missing, a page that ties together personal diaries in an aesthetic, comfy reading fashion. Imagine a community built around something like this and with the same keen attention to detail and eye pleasing... Or don't, by all means; it's just a task nobody seems to have succeeded at yet, and one I wouldn't mind finding, so I won't have to build it myself.

Not that I would; unfortunately, these things don't win on technical or style merits, but on excellent marketing, a field I have never excelled at. (And it's a bit too big a project to take on for the sheer fun of it.)

It's about time I started gathering up good feeds I find for some portion of this blog template -- I picked up the above location at the CentreSource blog, which seems dense in posts worth reading. My opinion, of course; occasional technical depth and insight, to the point-ness, and lots of web tech centric content. Yum.
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