Yahoo Pipes + Google Earth = News Around The World

May 29, 2007 at 12:34 pm | In google earth, kml, mashup, yahoo pipes | Leave a Comment

Application “launcher” here.

This is a simple “experiment” using new Geo features in yahoo pipes. It tries to locate news over Google Earth using a KML generated by Yahoo Pipes.

A Couple of screen captures here:
Yahoo Pipes + Google Earth = News Around The World

Yahoo Pipes + Google Earth = News Around The World 2

Application “launcher” here.

Mashing up, Around The World, Around The World…

Are Mashups and Yahoo Pipes ready for Production?

May 28, 2007 at 2:29 pm | In mashup, yahoo pipes | 1 Comment

As someone said, Yahoo Pipes is a dream come true for Web Developers and RSS/XML Fanatics: Easy to use, growing component base, cloning (a really useful “copy/paste” feature that helps you to learn many tricks from other people)

According to Pasha Sadri (here): After all, you can just as well build your own web platform based on Pipes and then find a way to make money off of it.

Is that really true? I know, pipes stills in beta, but frecuently downtime and errors can make you sad:

2007/02/08 Downtime : “As many of you noticed, we’ve had some downtime today as we try to cope with the unexpected heavy load. We’re working on adding more capacity and hope to be back to normal soon.“

But, a “dream come true” to developers can overwhelm your servers, as Pasha Sandri says in “Crazy 72 hours“: “It’s been almost 72 hours since our beta launch. Needless to say, the response to Pipes has been overwhelming for everyone on the team (and our servers!). I have finally had a chance to relax/sleep after addressing some of the immediate issues.”

(More downtime, here and here).

Really nice in terms of product’s reception, but annoying if you create pipes that doesn’t work as expected . (rss problems, server failures, non friendly errors during “development”…).

What if your $450m idea depends completely on someone else’s services and data? (perhaps a Web as Platform mashup monster that you feed with tons of public feeds and web services ).

Maybe you are playing god with your big Mashup, maybe you are becoming a Victor Frankenstein powered by RSS and REST. But remember, Mary Shelley’s novel doesn’t have a happy ending. Don’t forget that god doesn’t have to worry about QoS, high Availability, performance,cache, latency, Maintainability, clusters, distributed processing, team management, bug tracking, unit testing, load testing, concurrency, business plans, ROI…

Maybe for such kind of “big commercial mashups”, public free web services and data are not enough. High availability and data quality are big issues that have a price, and -obviously- you will have to pay it.

Finally, a gentle introduction to Yahoo Pipes: (for newbies and curious minds).

Pipes: A Tool For Remixing the Web

LastTube Buzz!

May 23, 2007 at 11:49 pm | In last.fm, lastTube, mashup, youtube | 4 Comments

Thank you all for your support. It seems that many people like LastTube (my little “One Day Mashup” experiment).

Some Buzz around LastTube:

- “Take Lasttube for example. It’s a great web-based video player combining Last.fm and Youtube, glued together with Yahoo Pipes and Adobe Flex 2. It’s been whipped up by one lone programmer in Colombia of all places, who by his own account only needed one day to complete this project, including coding, testing, googling and lunch time.”

Janko leaves a couple of interesting questions on the table:

-“If mashup programmers can do stuff like this in no time – what does that mean for start-ups like Last.fm? For one thing, they really have to try harder”.

- “People have been questioning the commercial viability of mashups for quite some time now. Is it possible to make money, build businesses with someone else’s data feeds? Maybe that question was wrong from the beginning. Instead, we should have used mashups as a kind of litmus test for commercial web offerings and asked: Is there really a business model for a start-up if someone else could achieve the same thing with a quick mashup?“

  • My “Last.fm meets YouTube” original pipe on the top of “Hot Pipes” in Yahoo Pipes during last weeks: (195 clones… and growing ;) )

lasttube pipe

  • You Got Your Last.fm in My You Tube: (Nice review with some suggestions for a next release) “The ability to access a filtered list of videos based on my listening behavior is a great feature. ..The overall UI is clean, simple and easy-to-use.”
  • The Evil Robot and Mashups: (Evil Robot says: It seems that is easy to use Web Services with Adobe Flex) “Además, aparentemente es facil hacer que una informacion publicada en un sitio web pueda ser leida por un “applet” de flash publicado en otro sitio (public web services). Con el plugin de java era practicamente imposible hacerlo.“
  • 10 Pipes for Your Tubes: “Here’s a list of the ten of the most useful video mashups to date: 1. Last.fm meets Youtube. This mashup searches Youtube for videos of the last ten tracks you played on Last.fm.”

last.fm video is coming…

May 18, 2007 at 9:21 pm | In last.fm, lastTube, video | Leave a Comment

last.fm video

You can find last.fm video examples Here and here excellent video quality, nice player… but… I like more lastTube :P

Flex Based Mashup: lastTube, last.fm meets Youtube.

May 7, 2007 at 7:02 pm | In as3, flex2, last.fm, mashup, video, yahoo pipes, youtube | 5 Comments

As a “proof of concept” and challenge for myself, I have create a Client Mashup using Flex 2 and Public Web Services.

Constraints: No server side code created. Only one day of work.

Result: “lastTube, last.fm meets Youtube”

Basically you can easily view Youtube’s videos related to your Recently Listened Tracks published in Last.fm.

Brief Description, Details and Application’s Launcher here:
http://flex2colombia.wordpress.com/lasttube-lastfm-meets-youtube/

Screen Capture:

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