Tired of visiting tons of sites to keep tabs on your friends (or vice versa)? Sign up for a Profilactic profile and link over 140 social sites (like Facebook, Flickr, Digg, etc.) and let your friends view the Profilactic mashup of your web activity.
Your Profilactic profile also has links to the specific social sites you use, so your friends can get quick access to your Dugg stories at Digg.com for instance. The mashup section can be searched or filtered by social site.
Social-site aggregation is a welcome concept as the number of sites we join seems to increase on a daily basis (private betas anyone?). Being able to go to one profile to view Twitter posts, Dugg stories, Flickr photos, and blog posts can make your web surfing more efficient.
There are plenty of ways to find the nearest bar, coffee shop or book store. Mapquest, Google Maps, and Windows Live Maps all let you find and plot local businesses on a map. But none of those services let you know if a shop is actually open.
That's where WhatsOpen comes in. Just type in what you're looking for and where you're looking. For example, restaurants in San Francisco or coffee shops near Mountain View. WhatsOpen will bring up a Google Maps mashup with store information, phone numbers, and hours of operation. While WhatsOpen doesn't seem to include holiday hours, the site could come in handy if you're looking for a place to buy groceries in the middle of the night or if you have a sudden urge for coffee at 2am.
WhatsOpen recently launched a public demo that covers California. But you can also sign up for a beta account covering the US, China, and Europe.
Have a friend that's coming in for a landing and want to see exactly where they are at the moment? Or if you just like watching planes, check out the GMaps Flight Tracker. This Google Mapsmashup tracks the status of inbound flights scheduled to land in Atlanta, Boston, New York's JFK, LA, Miami and San Francisco. Pick your city, and a list of the arriving flights are displayed. Click or mouse over the airline flight number of plane icon and the altitude, speed and heading coordinates are displayed as well as flight trail waypoints so you can check out the travel path.
The inbound flight schedule refreshes every 40 seconds so flight statuses are ensured to be at their most accurate. Data is provided from fboweb.com and based on the position reports for each aircraft once per minute, and sometimes once every 20 seconds in high traffic areas. Want to check things out in 3d? Download the GE kml file and check out past flights and height profiles in Google Earth.
While we don't condone speeding here at DLS, this is a Google Map mashup that pinpoints locations that people might not want to go above the speed limits in the Toronto, Ontario area.
This male targeted mashup pinpoints the locations more commonly home to hidden police cruisers with radar on their minds. By clicking on cars, users are presented with a description of where they are normally situated. Ok, so this map is great when you are sitting on your computer, but what about when you are out on the road, good luck remembering all these locations. No need to fret, there is a data download that can be imported into GPS devices.
Speedtrap, Beartraps and Copspy also track the locations of where our nation's finest police officers are doing their job.
If you are a mashup developer, there is no time like the present to make some cash for your creations.
Mashups are not only giant part of the Web 2.0 landscape, but a number of companies are recognizing this, and dipping into their corporate pockets to award creativity and development skills. Ok, so it's cheaper for these companies to run outside contests than to actually develop their own mashups in house, but if you are already fooling around with mashups, or want to get into it, these contests are great to get involved in.
Current mashup contests include a $10,000 pot from Voxbone, $10,000 to develop a PayPal Facebook App, and a trip to Prague from Skype.
If any DLS readers have developed a cool mashup, feel free to share it with us.
What happens when you mashup Google Maps with eBay? You get this hideous creation. So it's not the best designed mashup we have seen, in fact its pretty crude, but Visual eBay does provide a little visual glimpse into the world of eBay auctions.
This mashup pinpoints the exact locations that auctions are taking place in. Search for a keyword under a category and choose either the U.S., Canada, Australia or England, and Visual eBay pinpoints the locations on a Google Map. There is also a Google Gadget for Visual eBay that can be placed on your iGoogle homepage.
Visual eBay seemed to be a little buggy for us when trying it out.
At the Google Developer Day a little while ago, Google announced a Mashup Editor that they were releasing. It was by invitation only, and known as an interactive development environment that would allow users to edit, compile, test and manage applications.
We recently got the opportunity to check out the interface, and play around with it a bit. The Google Mashup Editor is built off of an AJAX development framework, and supplies users a set of tools that users can quickly and easily create simple web applications, smashups, and Google Gadgets using Google's applications like Google Maps. As long as you have a familiarity with XML, JavaScript, CSS and HTML you can build smashups. Of course there are ways that advanced developers can take advantage of the Smashup Editor, and its starts with using the JavaScript API.
After a smashup has been created using the reusable modules, users can test it in the Sandbox, and then publish it to a sub domain under googlemashups.com. Google does all the work there, from setting up the server, hosting, database and authentication.
Check out some samples of smashups created with the tool:
Have you ever wanted to create a nice little Web 2.0 mashup, but just didn't know where to turn to for an API that could grab the information you are looking to incorporate?
API's, application programming interface, are the source code that computer program libraries provide in order to support service requests. API's are often part of a standard software development kit, commonly referred to as an SDK. Companies that offer APIs range widely from Sony for their Playstation, Microsoft for Windows software, and more recently popularized in the online environment with Google Maps and many other online based mashups. As more and more organizations open up API's for developers to tool around with, that includes many that you visit online every single day, it gets harder and harder to keep track of what's available, and what is possible with them.
ProgrammableWeb has done a great job of supplying a comprehensive listing of all Web 2.0 API's. Anything from Google Adwords, del.icio.us, 30 boxes, Feedgator, BBC, Twitter and Zoho are listed here. All categorized and waiting for you to click and download.
Lots of companies are doing it, we just never expected it to come from Skype! They have officially entered the world of the mashup, and are celebrating in a big way. It's not a million dollars or anything, but its all about the creation isn't it. The Skype Developer Program wants your true innovative mashup.
The mashup has to have some "skypeness" to it, and center around the application while being usable for businesses or consumers. Its gotta make people go WOW, while being robust and reliable enough to expand in the future. But most of all, it has to be different and new.
The prize bag holds a trip to Prague to receive the 2007 mashup cup, promotion of your mashup by the Developer Program, a mention in the September newsletter, and a frameable Skype mashup certificate.
Ok, so the prizing is a bit lame for an eBay owned company, but it's truly about your development skills and the spotlight you will enter. Isn't it? Deadline for entries is August 31st, and 10 runners up along with the winner will get promoted and published.
Cell phone signals are pretty easy to catch now. Major providers have boosted their signals, and troubleshooted hard to reach areas, but every once and a while we hit a dead spot and the dreaded "hello?, hello? Are you there? hello?" kicks into play.
SignalMap hopes to alleviate any pain in this area. They have used the Google Maps API and mapped up a user generated list of cell phone signals by major service providers, mapping dead spots and comparing signal strengths.
There are a lot of mapped signal areas, but it is not by any means a comprehensive guide at the moment. However, it's building into a great site to check before heading out on business or pleasure to check if you might be heading into a bad area. To help the directory grow users can add their signal strengths, phone type and carrier to the list.
Many people are anticipating the launch of Apple's iPhone Friday at 6pm. To ensure you know where they are going to be before you set out on your overnight camping expedition this evening, we have a Google Map Mashup for you to check out.
http://iPhone.Findnearby.Net has been set up to show iPhone fanatics where they can go purchase the device on Friday, or anytime after the launch. The Mashup takes AT&T and Apple stores where iPhone are selling, together with eBay and Craigslist listings and plots them on a Google Map. Users can then search any US location up to a 200 mile radius from a location. There is also an option that will email you when an iPhone becomes available in your area. Good Luck!
BEA Systems, known for its leading enterprise infrastructure software, is getting set to launch its suite of corporate search and collaboration products. These three new applications look ready to help businesses with some Web 2.0 technologies including RSS feeds, tagging, and mashup platforms. Hey, enterprise business, here's your chance to roughly equal the kind of community building web interfaces that 20 somethings are pumping out from their basements.
Although integration efforts have been extremely slow for many businesses, it will be interesting to watch the effects these different integration options have with a number of useful 2.0 applications.
Google is all about buying companies. Not just any company, companies that help with their mission to organize all of the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Well, they have done it again with a site we profiled late last year, Panoramio.
Panoramio was built as a Google Maps mashup that lets users map photos based on geographic locations. The company is based in Spain and connects digital photographers with the ability to geo locate, store and organize photos in Google Earth. An API is also available with Panoramio that lets developers embed functionality into websites.
Google has already been using Panoramio's images in Google Earth as a default layer since early this year.
If there is one web 2.0 application that has "made it" then that application has got to be flickr. No other product is used as religiously by as diverse of user base as Yahoo's little photo sharing website. One of the key reasons for their success is the very powerful public API that lets users interact with the flickr archive via other applications.
Enter flickrvision. One part Google Maps, one part eavesdropping, 100% fun; flickrvision lets you watch users uploading photos live. The map view shows where the user is uploading from and a small snapshot of the photo is displayed over the location. Clicking on the photo reveals a larger version in the center of the screen while map continues to update in the background. Clicking on a user name takes you, as you might expect, to the users profile on flickr. It is a pretty simple concept but quickly becomes wildly addictive.
Think flickrvision is cool? Then you might also like twittervision which follows the same concept and displays live twitters as they happen.
You can thank (and curse!) David Troy for both of these time wasters. Now if only he'd combine the two concepts and toss in some del.icio.us links and YouTube videos. Then we'd really have the ultimate web 2.0 mashup.
Getting hitched soon? Or know a friend that is? This is the perfect tool to use to ensure everyone gets to your wedding events on time.
Wedding Mapper is an online tool that allows people to map out their wedding and all events associated with it so that friends, family and photographers can locate places easily on an interactive map. The mapping tool is free to use, and doesn't take long at all to set up.
Users can get started by entering the location where the wedding is taking place, then entering the date, or dates, that it will take place and Names of the bride and groom. After that, you're brought to the map where you simply drag and drop pinpoints to specify locations, or enter an address to show the exact spot. Photos, Descriptions, Locations and Comments can be added to each so everyone can be provided with as much information is necessary to get to the event on time, and not get lost.
The site is supported by ads, which can be removed for a one time fee of $9.95. That membership also includes a custom URL, ability to add links to wedding registries or other services, and file uploading for wedding invitations that can be printed out.
Lots of companies are doing it, we just never expected it to come from Skype! They have officially entered the world of the mashup, and are celebrating in a big way. It's not a million dollars or anything, but its all about the creation isn't it. The Skype Developer Program wants your 
If there is one web 2.0 application that has "made it" then that application has got to be flickr. No other product is used as religiously by as diverse of user base as Yahoo's little photo sharing website. One of the key reasons for their success is the very powerful public API that lets users interact with the flickr archive via other applications.
