What kind of mashup we talking about here?
Liz Gannes (daughter of my old buddy Stu) has a followup post to the WidgetsLive conference (put on by her boss - Om Malik) where she talks about 30Boxes new mashup capabilities and effect of utlizing time as an aspect of a mashup.
Liz then goes onto say “that’s what PeopleAggregator does - right?”
Well Liz is right - but only partially. It seems that Liz has been getting into Facebook’s ‘News Feed’ capability lately which gives her the ability to keep track of what her friends have been up to. 30Boxes now enables this same effect - but over time.
PeopleAggregator doesn’t currently aggregate over time, but we have been working on something I was showing at WidgetsLive - which is to aggregate friends from multiple services - and display them all in one widget.
We certainly have plans for lots of other ways to aggregate people, through compound feeds and through inter-connecting different socila networks together - via sending messages, creating groups or establishing relationships.
Other are defining people aggregation - in terms of search. This is what Jookster and Wink are doing. I expect there to be other form as well. Check our eTribes or WeeWorld.
So the 30Boxes/Facebook ‘lick’ ain’t the only way to ‘aggregate people’. BTW AOL just shipped something like that - as well.
This also goes back to something I was talking about a while back - “when does the aggregating of people begin?”
I really think that we can let the end-users decide what People Aggregation should be.
The way software is written today folks like us, Facebook or 30Boxes have to ‘guess’ what people want - and build out those features - and hardwire a user interface to it.
But ideally what SHOULD happen is that end-user will start to tinker and come up with their own combinations, configurations and customizations (CCC) - best suited to their own needs.
So mashups are the existing method for letting end-users tell us what they want. Clearly maps and calendars are core components to these bags of tricks. AOL’s new open AIM APIs will be another key ingredient in these bag of tricks. I really think social networking constructs - like personal pages and groups - are other core components (that’s what our APIs provide.)
But there was something else Liz wrote about - that I wanted to play off of.
Liz points to something John Musser has noted - that the rate of new APIs is steeply increasing, surging to over 6 new APIs a day. John has compiled over 1,000 APIs at his blog ‘programmable web’ - and to me - this is the single most important bit of information I’ve heard recently.
Most of us have to play a game where we have a short term business model we can survive on, while laying the groundwork for more ambitious plans of the future. We’ve seen Facebook, LinkedIn, Wink and Technorati evolve right in front of our eyes.
For us at Broadband Mechanics we’re playing the same game. Today we look like a social network white label service and platform - but what we’re waiting for is a critical mass of Open API enables services and products to be available.
But those APIs have to be two-way.
I asked John Musser of his 1,000+ APIs, how many were two-way. “Not many” was his reply.