mypipeline

Updated Aug 20 ‘08

Albumaniac: Lyrics.com + Last.fm mashup: game that pulls a random lyric or verse from the lyrics database, and four album images from the Last.fm REST service. The user has to guess which album the lyric is from. If they get it wrong, the albums disappear. If they get it right, the album art is automatically added to their knowledge base and that information is stored for later. The information could, for instance, be used to allow that user to act as an expert on that band or album, or whatever. Or it could just accumulate on that player’s profile as a ‘badge’ of their knowledge/skill, and therefore be matched against other players who share their knowledge etc.

Band-aid: Tour dates map mashup with Yahoo! Maps and Upcoming.org. Visualisation exercise for traditional calendar-based information. User searches for a particular band, and the map is populated with their tour dates and locations, with a 1-2-3-4-5 dot-connection to indicate the sequence of the tour. Then the user can form a group that campaigns to get their favourite bands to play in their hometown by pledges for ticket sales. The user could use a ticketmaster purchasing client to buy tickets for the tour. This would be even better if the unsigned bands could add their gig locations and dates to the map itself.

Twitter + 43People.com mash: user  tweets goal progress notes to their 43things.com goal list. This would then appear as a mini-blog that gradually builds a graphical progress report for all of their goals/travel spots/etc. They could set milestones as well (I’ve raised £300 of £1000 to do my Mt Kilamanjaro trip) or set themselves challenges with the new API call on 43things.

Caveat: I haven’t checked whether any of these actually exist..some probably do. It’s just a brain dump, so I can start thinking about something else.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects, Social Media | tags: mashups, music, open APIs. | #

A couple months ago Platform4 launched a creative code contest for developers keen to mash up Channel4’s Film4 content with other content from around the web.

We had some great entries but it was Thomas Butterworth with his enhanced cinema search who was crowned the overall winner and awarded £1500 for his mash-up of Google Maps, YouTube movie trailers and Film4 reviews.

The judges were impressed with Thomas’ app’s ease of use, clear utility and how it added clear value to the Film4 reviews that underpinned it. In the words of one judge, it’s a simple idea, well delivered.

Our two runners-up excelled in creating quirky apps that played with ideas of traditional navigation and social interactions.

Daniel Hilton’s group-decision engine for choosing a film to watch and what takeaway to eat on the night impressed us with its kooky nature and attempt to marry usefulness with the social aspects of ‘movie nights’. It also employed a postcode lookup tool, but instead of searching for cinemas near you, found food delivery places nearby.

Andrew Chalkey’s feedreading service with built-in previews and blog reactions took joint second prize. It combined trailers from Apple’s trailer service and the latest blog reviews of the films from Technorati. Both Daniel and Andrew won £250 for their trouble.

We’ve been really impressed by all the submissions received – it’s been a great competition. Hopefully we’ll be able to run similar contests with more Channel4 feeds later in the year. (Maybe even using some RESTful C4 services

No Comments | In: Data Visualization, UX, Web Apps | tags: channel4, mashups, platform4. | #

Last night, before a fitful sleep began, these visualisation app ideas popped into my nugget, so I thought I’d jot them down before I forgot that I had thunk them…

MyCommentsComments widget: simple, but I don’t know of any working widgets that do this (please let me know if there is one!). Basically, the idea is that if you have signed in with a recognised or OpenID sign-on, the widget would track the replies to your comments by searching for the @yourusername intro to subsequent comments, to let you know who’s said what about your comments.

Update: I read today about five Comments projects that do exactly this! Read about them here.

Starcross’d: (notice ubiquitous omission of the ‘e’). This site would part Flickr mash-up and part social network. The aim would be to log where you were in the world at any point in your life, and to create a travel ‘line’ (like they do sometimes in the Indiana Jones movies when Indie is jetting from one country to the next) that you could then match with other people’s. You could, for instance, see where in the world in relation to your recently met girlfriend or boyfriend you were when certain big events happened. Or, if we mashed in data from celeb magazines online, you could find out which celebrities were closest to you on any given day. This would be visualised in a “bubble map” similar to that used by Flidg’t.

Snowflakes: this ties in to the idea that everyone - even profiles online - is a completely unique identity. So the app would attempt to make a visual representation of your interests, relationships, political leanings, photos etc, that was completely different to every other profile out there.

And a final note, carrying on from the idea that we all want to know where other people were and what they were doing when a significant world event occurred, there might be a simple app waiting to be built that takes two details from the user - the activity and the world event. In this way it could put together a little tapestry of what the world was doing when something BIG happened elsewhere. It would, of course, rely on the story-telling ability of the people entering their information, but it’s still an interesting idea - at least to me anyway.

technorati tags:visualization, social-networks

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No Comments | In: Ideas, Inspirations, Social Media, UX, Web Apps | tags: mashups, widgets. | #

I really like this concept from Trivop: use a Google Maps interface to display user-made and pro-made video clips about a particular location. The site’s speciality is guides to hotels, but there are countless other tributaries to this river. How about embedded guides to towns and local events, or the best road trips for cars? The possibilities are endless.

Filmmakers are encouraged to sign up to make movies about hotels for the site for cash: meaning there’s incentive to upload your videos, not just for posterity. And of course hotels pay to be listed, meaning there’s not just advertising for revenue. At the moment, it’s limited to French and English hotels, but I can see it fast blooming into a global network.

technorati tags:flashvideo, UGC, startup, trivop, hotel

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No Comments | In: Reviews, Social Media, Web Apps | tags: mashups, video. | #