I spent a few hours on Wednesday at Mashup Camp — I think this was the 4th event, the second I’ve attended. As previously I found most value in the “speed geeking” portion: an hour or two spent moving from table to table in a big room hearing a succession of five-minute demos by developers showing off some cool trick or application mashup. Last year I wrote about what it all means:
…you got a window onto a simpler, faster, and perhaps smarter approach to software product development — one that trades in the virtue of from-the-ground-up consistency and thoroughness for the even more compelling virtue of “getting something working fast.” It’s software development as a Darwinian ocean in which large numbers of small projects are launched into the water. Only a handful will make it to land. But most of them required so little investment that the casualty rate is nothing to lose sleep over.
This time I’ll just mention a few demos that I thought stood out:
- Chime.tv: This is essentially a kind of Del.icio.us for videos, with a smart built-in video player and some basic tools for building and sharing channels. Nothing revolutionary here, except that (a) it lets you aggregate videos you find all over the Web (not just one provider like YouTube) into your own playlist/channel; and (b) it happens to be remarkably well-designed. I expect to be using it for a while as a video-viewing manager. We’ll see how it holds up.
- Myk O’Leary’s twitterlicious serves as a simple hookup between Twitter and Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia.com). In other words: If you’re reading Twitter messages (“Tweets”) on a mobile device and they contain URLs that are inconvenient to save and that you can’t properly visit at the moment, Twitterlicious sends the “tweet” to your Del.icio.us account as a private bookmark with a special tag. You can review these at your desktop leisure.
- Lignup showed a cool little application that lets you use your cellphone as a mobile input device to add voice annotation to a Web page or object (like, for instance, a Flickr photo). (This press release tells a little more.)
This Mashup Camp was a little less mobbed than the last one I went to, but there still seemed to be plenty of good ideas. And I even bumped into a few people who’d read Dreaming in Code, which always puts me in a good mood.
This weekend I’m going to try to go to at least some of WordPress Camp. Then next week my family will be doing some actual camping — like, in a tent. I think we’ll call it Camp Camp.
[tags]mashup camp, mashup camp 4, mashups[/tags]
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