Web Services Mash-Up

Alan Taylor -

Kokogiak Media, Amazon Light

Cal Henderson -

Ludicorp, Flickr.com

Erik Benson -

Robot Co-op, Allconsuming.net

Mashup Intro (via Amazon Light 4)

• Amazon Light 4 - incorporates Amazon, Google, Yahoo, ties into Gmail, Blogger, Libraries, more.
• Intended to tie together as many services as reasonable
• Unintended Discoveries (news, related sites) & unintended restrictions (Amazon nixed commercial links)
• Positive feedback - Interoperability and ease-of-use

A couple of Definitions

• Most web services mentioned here are small "w" services. Beta/Restricted/Possibly Unreliable
• SOAP/REST - whatever, for this tutorial it's all just XML and XML is good (right?)

Resources - What's Available?

• Amazon, Google, Technorati, Flickr
  (the ones we'll focus on)
• eBay, salesforce.com (crm), Paypal, Safari (O'Reilly Catalog), Nat'l Weather Service, GigaBlast
• [Unofficial] RSS Feeds like Craigslist, Yahoo News, Upcoming.org (use with care)
• [Even more unofficial] Screen Scrapes, Include files (best for personal-use tools)

Mash 'em up!

• Complementary data is your friend
• Overlaps, Intersections, Keywords, Tags, Categories, etc.
• Use a common "key" to fetch multiple results (technorati tags)
• Chain results together, building on each call (Google Categories -> Flickr tags)
• Add your own information into the mix

Flickr

• http://flickr.com/services/api/
• Fetch Info (User, Photo, Sets) based on keyword, id, email
• Upload, Manage, Annotate Photos
• Free, requires Dev Token

Amazon

• http://amazon.com/gp/aws/sdk
• Fetch almost any info about Amazon items (Price, Title, Reviews, Details, etc.)
• Additional Services - Remote Shopping Cart, XSL Transformation, Simple Queue Service, Alexa Info
• Free, requires Dev Token, Limited to 1 call per second.

Google

• http://www.google.com/apis
• Google Search, Google Cache, Spelling
• Accepts Advanced Search Queries like "Mars site:nasa.gov filetype:doc"
• Free, requires Dev Token, Limited to 1,000 queries per day
• SOAP Only

Technorati

• http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/
• Query Cosmos, Keyword, Tags, Info, Pinging, more
• Free, requires Dev Token, Limited to 500 calls per day

Considerations, part I

• Terms of Use, Attribution/credit/licensing
• Acting conservatively (when using others' resources)
• Reliability/Graceful failure (esp. when results are chained)

Considerations, part II

• Caching (wisdom of and methods of)
• Using RSS as an API, screen-scraping
• Encourage opening up other APIs, make it business-wise

Real-world Mashup Examples I

• Mappr - Based on Flickr.com API and US Gov't ZIP99 database.
• Matches location-name tags to Lat/Long and Maps them out

Real-world Mashup Examples II

• Dropcash - Uses TypeKey for authentication, Paypal for transactions.
• Fundraising tool - allow multiple individuals to "pitch-in" toward a goal.

Real-world Mashup Examples III

• Allconsuming.net - Uses blo.gs, Amazon and Google.
• Monitors weblogs for Book mentions, gathers them together, displays mentions, links, metadata

Cal Henderson, Ludicorp

Cal Henderson
- Lead Developer, Ludicorp

Erik Benson, The Robot Co-op

Erik Benson
- Chief Janitorial Officer, The Robot Co-op

Mashup Hackathon Ideas

• Locale-based (travel, events, "What just happened?")
  - tie-in to GoogleMaps and/or A9Local?
• Big-Name based (celebrity, pop culture icons)
  - Create an Insta-portal and/or store.
• Topical (Current Events, Today in History)
  - tie into Personal Calendaring app?
• Flickr Games: "MadLibs" Take a story/poem/quote, swap in flickr images for words, letters -- "Where is this?" Use location-name-tagged images, force people to guess locations.

Hackathon Description, Kickoff

• 90 Minutes
• Using any combo of services - what can you come up with?
• Client-side DHTML app - or whatever toolset you wish.
• At least three groups. Erik, Cal and I will be diving in as well.

Guided Hackathon Resources

• Flickr API http://flickr.com/services/api/
• Amazon API http://amazon.com/gp/aws/sdk
• Google API http://www.google.com/apis
• Technorati API http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/
• Client-side app (Save locally) http://kokogiak.com/mashup/masher.html
• More Resources http://kokogiak.com/mashup/resources.html