On the second day of Mashup Camp [tags, photos], anyone who wanted to had the opportunity to show off their mashups. The format for the demos was “speed hacking”, where every demoer was given a table and everyone circulated from table to table in semi-strict five minute segments.
Of special note to me were:
- Chicago Crime, by Adrian Holovaty
- Podbop, by Taylor McKnight and Daniel Westermann-Clark.
- TrainCheck, by Frank Harris and Bart Solowiej
Chicago Crime came second place but was in some deep meaningful sense was probably the best demo there, if you believe there’s going to be or should be an “infosphere”. Although the application is kind of limited in scope, the idea that just about everything is a URI for querying the underlying database is very very powerful and this shows it off very well. Adrian‘s the big brains behind “Django”: and I look forward to meeting him again in the future, perhaps at Chicago Django Camp (hint hint). Also worth mentioning is that CC is probably the first Google Maps mashup ever created.
Podbop came in a well deserved first place, netting the winners a Mac and a fat-ass Sun T2000 server. What developers should take away from Podbop is that (1) applications should so something useful and (2) the simplest interfaces are often the best. Two thoughts: Eventful should host the best Eventful applications themselves and Popbop should make their artist DB available as an API.
TrainCheck is an interesting and simple concept: you need to no the time for the next train (or hopefully, bus)? Just text message on your mobile and the next three departure times are texted back to you. If organizations like the TTC adopted a microformat for transit schedules, rolling this app (and many others) out to many cities would be a breeze. A brief digression: the TTC won’t do it, because they’ll either give a contract to some big org like Google (they’re talking about this) or they’ll build some closed unuseful application themselves. Blech. Power to the people, baby.
Two other companies I wanted to mention. Eventful, an online repository of places and events, powers half the Popbop application. They had a really cool mashup of Eventful straight into Google Maps, where you could fly around the Earth and see what was happening where popup in real time. I also want to mention Ning, because in terms of you being able to create a mashup or social application, well, they’re probably the first place you should visit.