WSFinder

How To Make Your Own Web Mashup -- from Programmable Web

John over at Programmable Web just put up a great little guide on how to make a mashup. Worth checking out if you're trying to play with this stuff and want to figure out what to do.

Chris

Web Services with Network Effect

This is a repost from my 1000flowersbloom blog that I thought was appropriate

I had been looking at the Web 2.0 world as a series of data silos, web services, and aggregators. I think that there is another way to look at is as well which is to examine which services stretch across all sites and gain network effect by doing so.

I think that a reputation system is a great example of a service that does this and that gets stronger the more sites it is deployed across. Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures has a post about why it won't work. Mary Hodder was at a Union Square Ventures session in NY where they talked about it:

Mary - "you can pull data for reputation from Ebay.... but the thing about the difference between what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay's reputation information is that the mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it's such a bizarre social environment, everybody is under tremendous pressure to make this sort of, you know, A+++ best sale I've ever had, which, I mean, would only exist if the guy who was selling you the thing drove me the item from Kansas or something, otherwise it's just probably B+. [So]... the reputation information is perfect or it's terrible, and when you pull it out of that system ... it doesn't match up. It doesn't translate with other walled garden reputations."

I have to say that I disagree with Mary Hodder on this one. I think that it would be tremendously valuable to know what someone's eBay rating was in other contexts.

Let's say I'm on Craigslist - right now I have no trust mechansim. I'd much rather at least have the eBay one even though it might be imperfect. I also think that people will understand that when a rating is presented as an eBay rating that they will be able to contextualize what that really translates into.

The more the reputation system is used the stronger it gets. A reputation system is going to be very important in further enabling person to person transactions.

Chris

Two Blogs Now!

WSFinder.com was started by Chris Law and me (Paul Martino). We quickly found that there was a need for a Wiki based API directory. Doing it as a closed "directory" seemed a little Web 1.0 for us. Once we put the Wiki up last month, we had something like 38,000 people link to it in 24 hours. It was truly amazing to see the speed with which stuff happens now.

I am now going to be the primary author of this blog which is focused on APIs, Mashups, and Web 2.0 technologies. Chris Law is now the author of the 1000flowersbloom blog that is about the whole word of Web 2.0, not just the APIs. He has great content and exclusive interviews with the big players in the space.

We are both working together on these efforts. In the next month or so you are going to see a few new cool technologies from us. We have "suggestions" web service that we have been working on for a bit of time that will be launching soon. We also recently hired two people to begin working on our new company. More on that soon.

Web 2.0 is People

At one of the sessions during the Web 2.0 conference, Ross Mayfield stood up and proclaimed “Web 2.0 is People!” 

I was initially thinking that a tight definition of Web 2.0 was required and that it should really be focused on the technology but upon further reflection I really do think that People are also a driving force. To be more specific, I think that User Generated Content is one thing that is driving huge amounts of the adoption that we’ve seen over the last couple of years.

While it’s obvious that phenomena like social networking are driven by user generated content, I would also argue that RSS and podcasting are as well. Think about this for a second. Pointcast came out in the mid nineties with a push driven model that delivered content right to your desktop. It was popular but never really got adopted en masse. Why is it that RSS and podcasting are working out so well? I think it’s because of the content. People really want to keep up with what their friends have to say and what people they respect have to say more than just what the mainstream media have to say. 

An alternative explanation is that the longtail is what is really driving this. That people can now get access to the content that they really want in a microcast kind of way. Although if you think about it – all that longtail content is being driven by user generated content as opposed to content from big media.

Chris

How to keep Founders around...

Nova Spivak has some interesting commentary about how to keep founders engaged at a startup after they are no longer running the show. This was prompted through a post from Fred Wilson.

Nova's comments are right on the money. I don't know that I can say it much better than he did. Outside CEOs definitely can be necessary to shake things up and get them on a more steady execution path. The culture of the company shifts when this happens and that is never a clean process. I experienced this at Tribe where all of us founders eventually exited.

I have to stress that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes founders should not stick around and that's just better for the company and the founders. More value is created that couldn't be otherwise.

Chris

What is Web 2.0?

After I posted my Map of the Web 2.0 World I got a lot of feedback from people saying that they thought it was interesting but that I had missed a lot categories about what Web 2.0 is.

I think that Tim O'Reilly's post on Web 2.0 is excellent. Here's the compact verison.

In my mind the most key aspect of Web 2.0 is that data and functionality are easily shared. Integrating data is much easier than before and that is allowing that information to be used in ways never thought of by the original creators.

Functionality is also much easier to integrate than before. We are now seeing a proliferation of mash ups and examples of APIs being used that we haven't seen before.

On this point I think that there are many companies which are assumed to be Web 2.0 companies just because they are using the latest technologies. I strongly disagree with this. I don't think that your company is a Web 2.0 company just because it uses AJAX. The thing about Google Maps that makes it a great example of Web 2.0 is that it allows other people to go ahead and use the functionality not that there is a whizzy new interface. There will always be whizzy new interfaces, Google Earth was a neat interface where you could zoom around and look at things in ways that you couldn't before but I wouldn't call that Web 2.0.

That is really the motivation behind the Map of the Web 2.0 World that I put up. Web 1.0 is all about data silos and putting up your own database, Web 2.0 is all about sharing the data nad aggregating for your users.

Things to do to the Wiki

I thought I'd give folks some insight into some of the things we're thinking about for the wiki.

• Add a section for applications that are using webservices. They're there right now but honestly I think they're way too hard to find and add to. I'll fix that in the next few days.
• I'm thinking about adding a section for upcoming Open APIs. So for example there are folks like Odeo who have announced that they are going to be doing Open APIs but haven't yet.  I'd like to keep the directory fairly clean in terms of only having APIs that you can use today in a separate section but it would be cool to let people announce their intentions too.
• Make the font size bigger. Anyone know a lot about MOIN and want to help with that?
• Let people subscribe via RSS to changes to the wiki. Anyone know how I can do that?

Chris

TechCrunch likes us!

A very nice post from TechCrunch that you can see here . TechCrunch is a very cool blog that keeps up with the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications that are out there. I have them prominently in my bloglines to let me know about new apps that they profile.

I am hoping that the companies they blog about open up their APIs and let other developers do some cool things with it.

Chris

We are up

I've been scouring the web for some time trying to compile an initial list of APIs that people could use to create applications with and now that we're up to over 80. I think it's pretty cool.

It's our hope that you find this resource useful and that it inspires you to create some cool applications using these Web Services. Please let us know once you do create them and we'll add them to the examples pages. Or just add to the wiki yourself!

We also hope that this effort will encourage more companies and developers will open up their APIs and let other people have access to them. We've seen many examples of great new things that have been created using open APIs that no one would have anticipated before. A burst of cool new services is emerging and we want to help accelerate that process.

This blog is going to be used to talk about what is going with the WSFinder Wiki as well as interesting thoughts we have on Web 2.0 and Web Services in general.

Drop us a line and let us know what you think! I'm at chrislaw(at)gmail(dot)com

You can get back to the WSFinder Wiki here at http://www.wsfinder.com

Chris