Dan Catt grabbed his digital camera, went for a walk in the country near where he lives in Stoke on Trent, and ended up being hired by Yahoo. Well, quite a lot happened in between. Such as Catt launching a website called Geobloggers.com to display his pictures, which also enabled other people to put Flickr photos on Google Maps.
”I put up 17 photos to start,” says Catt, ”and they were dotted around my local area. At the end of the first day there was about 150, and at the end of the first week, just under a thousand. I think there’s over 100 000 geotagged photos now — probably a lot more! The idea spoke to people.”
Geobloggers.com, started last March, was Catt’s first foray into what we now call mashups, which are reckoned to be the next big thing in the world of Web 2.0. The term originated in the music industry, where it means combining parts of two songs to make something new and, occasionally, better.
For example, in the United Kingdom, Roy Kerr (The Freelance Hellraiser) created a mashup called A Stroke of Genius by combining Christina Aguilera’s vocal from Genie in a Bottle with the backing from the Strokes’ Hard to Explain. But the most famous example — one used by Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who launched the Creative Commons — is DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, which combines the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album with reprocessed tracks from the Beatles’ White Album.
On the web, mashups are usually created by taking data from two or more sources and combining them to make something interesting and new. ChicagoCrime, for example, took police data for crime incidents and plotted them on street maps from Google Maps. Now, if you were visiting an area you didn’t know, you could check in advance whether it was the sort of place you might get mugged, and when.
In Catt’s case, the mashup involved ”geotagging” photos from Flickr by adding latitude and longitude data, and locating them on Google Maps — which was tricky at the time because, says Catt, Google had yet to release an applications programming interface, or API.
Welcome response
An API provides an interface and a set of rules that make it much easier to extract data from a website. It’s a bit like a record company releasing the vocals, guitars and drums as separate tracks, so you would not have to use digital processing to extract the parts you wanted. But whereas record companies are generally hostile to having their stuff re-used, and respond with ”cease and desist” orders, web-based companies seem to love it.
Amazon, Google and Yahoo have led the way by launching APIs that let people take their data and reuse it. The Mashup Feed website, which tracks mashups, lists 144 APIs used by 355 mashups. Google Maps, with 195 sites, is by far the most popular, but Amazon (35), Yahoo Maps (33), Flickr (30), Microsoft’s VirtualEarth (30), Delicious (19), eBay (15) and MSN Messenger (11) are all gaining acceptance. Other useful data feeds include weather and traffic information, events and calendar listings, and electronic programme information (TV listing).
The key thing is that the feeds are only combined on the user’s PC. You don’t need to create or pay for data, or pay for the web servers and associated communications bandwidth needed to run something like Google or Amazon.
As people experiment to find out what they can do, Mashup Feed’s list of sites is growing by an average of 2,6 a day. ”That’s kind of remarkable for something that’s just in its embryonic stage,” says David Berlind, a US-based journalist who is co-organising a Mashup Camp in Mountain View, California, later this month. He describes it as a free event intended to get the people who are creating mashups in the same room as the people creating APIs, so each can figure out what the other needs.
”It’s like the early days of the PC industry,” says Berlind, ”and a lot of people are doing things in their spare time — they have jobs. They don’t have the time or money to invest in high-level conferences.”
Berlind argues that mashups are being built on the same kind of three-layer structure as the personal computer industry. There you have the PC as the base platform, Windows or another operating system providing the APIs, and developers using the APIs to build applications on top. In this case, the internet is the platform, firms such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon are providing the APIs, and the mashups are the applications.
”What makes mashups really different is that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist,” says Berlind. Relatively few people had the programming skills needed to turn their ideas into PC applications, but with mashups, ”the barrier for turning your creativity into an innovation is very much lower. Your grandmother could do it,” says Berlind. Well, maybe not yet, he adds, but that’s the way things are heading.
”The other great thing about this system is that you don’t have to get anyone’s permission to add an API to it, and then anybody can use it. Where there’s one person or a group in control, that by itself can slow down innovation,” says Berlind.
And it’s not geographically limited. A major part of today’s hi-tech industry is based on the Pacific coast of North America, from Vancouver, Canada, through Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Las Vegas down to San Diego, near the border with Mexico. That includes Intel and Microsoft, Sun and Oracle, Google and Yahoo, and the universities in Berkeley and Stanford. But mashups ignore borders, and can include both local and global feeds.
Dom Ramsey is one of the people who has benefited. He is a British web designer who developed a successful photo-sharing/photo-blogging site at Fotothing.com, then sold it. ”I started doing mashups for fun, as a sort of hobby,” he says. ”It’s a way of challenging yourself, and good mashups can become commercial.”
He’d long been interested in the idea of plotting local news stories, but there was not a suitable news feed, and the maps were a problem, too. Ordnance Survey has great digital maps but they are Crown Copyright. ”It’s a bit of a sore point in the geoprogramming community,” says Ramsey, ”and there’s a project called Openstreetmap trying to create an alternative — but it doesn’t have enough data.”
Ramsey’s idea for a local news map suddenly became feasible when Google Maps provided UK coverage, and the BBC started producing RSS feeds. Indeed, when it launched its Backstage.bbc.co.uk project on July 23, the BBC started actively encouraging and supporting mashups. Ramsey produced Local Knowledge, which ”displays BBC travel news, BBC London traffic cams, local weather, geotagged Flickr photos and UK Gatso speed cameras. ”But I’ll be adding more soon,” he says. He is taking data from WeatherPixie, Pocket GPS World, Catt’s Geobloggers, GeoURL, Yahoo News and Flickr and mapping it to Google Maps.
Do-gooders
The BBC’s expanding Feed Factory and Backstage.bbc.co.uk projects have boosted the UK mashups scene, and BBC spokesperson James Hedges says this is another case like the Creative Archive, where ”you pay for it, so we’re giving it back to you. The BBC is a public service, so the conversation is not ‘What’s the business model?’, it’s ‘Does this provide value for licence fee payers?’ We can genuinely do good!”
”What’s the business model for the commercial companies?” is another question. When users pick up data feeds, they are not going to the site and being exposed to ads, and so far, nobody is charging fees.
”That’s evidence of how embryonic a state we’re in right now,” says Berlind: ”we just don’t have an answer to that question! It costs the API provider some amount of money every time a mashup accesses an API, but they’re still trying to figure out what the business model is, and how to move forward.”
At the moment, there’s a land grab under way. The major API suppliers want their APIs plugged into everybody’s applications, so they are, in Berlind’s words, ”competing with one another for the hearts and minds of developers”. And the costs are still small, so they can worry about making money from them later.
It’s also not so obvious how mashups progress when they go beyond relatively simple — but powerful — ideas such as plotting photos, crime incidents or dating adverts on Google or Yahoo or Microsoft maps, or mapping house price data against pollution data, or whatever. Combining, say, TV listings with your diary so your system knows to record programmes when you’re out — one of Catt’s many ideas — looks harder.
Ben Metcalf, the project leader on Backstage.bbc.co.uk, reckons Google Maps has become popular because of the interface it brings with it. He thinks that rather than simply combining data feeds, the future of mashups is with people providing interfaces that enable you to display data in ways you wouldn’t normally see it. What that might be, of course, is anybody’s guess. There may be fortunes to be made.
If not, as Berlind says, ”it’s great to be at this stage and watch this whole mashups thing blossoming in front of us”. In other words, it’s fun. And Catt? He started work at another of Yahoo’s acquisitions, Flickr, last month. ”I’m still going to be working on geobloggers and adding cool stuff,” he blogged. ”It’ll become a bit of an experimental lab.” Not so different from how it began less than a year ago, in fact. – Guardian Unlimited Â