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Content Tagged with mashups + Web2.0

This fabulous idea still falls short in user experience.

Idiomag is a company we love to tell people about - it's one of the most awesome ideas we've seen in a long time. The personalized music magazine site relaunched today with 4 times more content than ever before and a more traditional, link-intensive page design. Unfortunately, this great idea has serious problems in implementation and today's redesign doesn't appear to have solved those problems.

Sponsor

Here's the basic story of how Idiomag works. The site asks for your user name on one of the most popular music social networks (Pandora, Last.fm, Moog, etc.) and then uses your publicly available taste data to build a personalized "music magazine" in Flash. The magazine combines videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, MP3s and syndicated music blog content.

Idiomag looks at the color scheme of the video or photos accompanying an article and bases the whole page aesthetics on a complimentary set of colors. The service learns from your feedback and offers a new set of recommendations ever day.

We love the idea, but two years after Idiomag launched, we still return to the site begrudgingly today. We visit it at every opportunity, appreciating the music recommendations and hoping the rest of the site will get better.

Content is Hard

Why is it so unpleasant to go to Idiomag? Mostly because the syndicated text content from music blogs is awful. Most of it is really poorly written and the presentation is even worse. The Flash display of text from feeds misses punctuation, inserts spaces between letters in the middle of words - it's absolutely unreadable.

We keep hoping that the next article served up will be free of overdrawn adjective soup or abrupt beginnings and topic changes. No such luck.

There's obviously a world full of crappy music blogs out there, and we appreciate the MP3s they post, but Idiomag's parsing for quality content isn't working. The blog posts are placed very prominently on every page of the site and the whole user experience suffers as a result.

There are a lot of moving parts in the UI that make it unpleasant to use, as well. The first paragraph of every article is repeated as a "pull quote" at the top of the page, meaning you've got to skip the 2nd paragraph on every page because it's the same as the first. There's an independent collections of MP3s playing on all the pages, luckily they stop when a video loads, but they are no longer tied to the same artists as the articles and it appears that every article now has videos instead of photos.

We didn't see any of the celebrated new content from partners like Billboard and Rolling Stone. As part of the relaunch today, Idiomag says it has quadrupled the number of articles it can offer - up to 11,000 per month.

Give it a try for yourself, it's a great idea and maybe it will serve you better than it has us.

Discuss

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that enables a new approach to building user generated mash-ups for really useful reasons. I could go on about it, but the easiest way to understand it is to just watch the embedded video below from Mozilla Labs and jump over and read Aza Raskin’s post about it at his own blog for some more details.

*user-centric* mashups (versus site-centric mashups)

We usually write about serious things here at ReadWriteWeb but it's Friday night and we've got to make an exception for Javascript Hero. Note: We're hearing reports that the site doesn't work well in IE, just so you know. It's the work of developer rock star John Resig and was brought to our attention by Chris Messina (again).

We'd tell you about it, but we'd rather you just go play it. Particularly if you're a Guitar Hero fan. Then take this opportunity to make a mental reminder to check out what Resig does and what Messina finds, too.

How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

Some of Our Favorites

AideRSS plus Snacker

RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.

Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.

Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer

You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.

You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.

FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp

We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.

Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.

Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.

Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.

Facebook plus Dapper

The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.

One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.

Friends of RWW

We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.

Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.

MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.

Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.

Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.

Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.

What About You?

What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.

Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.

Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!

インテルによるマッシュアップツール

Open standard based user authentication protocol oAuth has now been implemented across all Google Data APIs, quickly offering this young standard for easy mashups more market validation than it's ever had before.

Eight months ago we wrote about the launch of oAuth 1.0, asking if the standard would lead to a flood of mashups across the web.

A standard method of authenticating users across different services means that mashup builders need only write one authentication process, then apply it to all data sources that support the standard. That's hot, and it's now spreading faster around the web than we thought. We discuss what this means for users below.

Google's Support

Last night the Google Data API blog announced that oAuth is now available for all Google Data APIs, everything from Gmail contacts to Google Calendar to Docs to YouTube. This means that 3rd party app developers now have one easy, standardized and secure way to authenticate that their users really own the Google accounts they say they do - without the apps asking users for their Google passwords. That data from Google can then be mashed up with any other application interested in leveraging it.

Google had included oAuth into the OpenSocial framework, but there was little indication that app developers were making use of it. Google's recently launched FriendConnect offered website developers disappointingly little access to their users' data - partitioning the Google functionality into an iframe inside participating pages.

Other Support

We've wondered recently whether oAuth was just a good idea that wasn't really gaining any traction. The list of sites with live oAuth support has been much smaller than we hoped. Now that's changing fast. PhotoBucket offers oAuth support and today SmugMug announced it as well.

We expect to see oAuth authenticating and relying parties spring up all around the web now that coveted Google user data is available through oAuth.

What This Means for Users

There is now no good reason for new applications to ask you for your Gmail username and password in order to access your list of contacts. Don't give it to them - there's a standard, approved way for them to access that data now that doesn't require giving them unlimited access to your entire account.

Apps that don't use the approved Google user authentication method in short order will be acting like a mail carrier who says they have to have a key to the inside of your house to pick up your mail because they aren't familiar with the mailbox on the front porch.

Furthermore, we as users can now expect a thrilling new wave of mashup options that can take secure advantage of our Google data. Google's adoption of oAuth is one of the most significant, tangible moves in support of authentic data portability that we've seen in a long time. App developers should be tripping over each other to make use of this data so that our use of their apps can be made richer, more powerfully useful and engaging. While they are developing to take advantage of Google's oAuth APIs, why not offer some oAuth back out to the world as well? Google's validation of the standard should start a snowball of standards enabled mashups.

We're very excited that Google has taken this step to un-silo our data and support the mutually beneficial ecosystem of mashup developers and users. We're very happy too for the community of oAuth supporters, who have done a great job building and spreading something so needed around the web. Today is a good day for the future of the web.

How one CEO Facebooked his company When Jeremy Burton arrived as CEO at private-equity-owned Serena Software last year, he found a respectable but boring 25-year-old firm still profitably churning out mainframe-oriented product

Japanese media-wiki company Nota offers a service called C-Shirt, a fascinating combination of technologies and concepts unlike anything we've seen before. The company sells t-shirts like Threadless or scads of other online vendors, but with a serious twist.

It's a t-shirt, but with a mobile scannable code, wiki-like editing and a CreativeCommons license.

How it Works

C-Shirt shirts each come with a scannable little QR (Quick Response) code in the corner. If you see a C-Shirt that you like, worn by someone walking around town, you can scan the QR code with your mobile phone. (Especially if you're in Japan where people scan QR codes with their phones all the time.) Your phone then captures the shirt's unique URL on the Nota website, where you can load it up and edit the design however you like.

Each design is given a Creative Commons license (that's what the C stands for) according to the wishes of the creator. Once you've got it how you like it, you can have it shipped to you just like any other T-shirt website would do.

The Nota publishing platform does more than just C-shirts, too.

It Works In Japan

It's a fascinating concept that might or might not translate well to other cultures and places. Few phones in the US, for example, are capable of scanning in codes with native mobile software. Everyone's phone can in Japan though. I spent last week in Tokyo, courtesy of Portland, Oregon company Lunarr, and saw QR codes intended for mobile scanning everywhere I went. Posters advertising things on the subway, for example, used QR codes to make it easy to follow up online.

Powerful mobile phones were all over Japan and most of the startups, investors and government officials I met there were heavily focused on the mobile sector. People make their purchases from vending machines by swiping their mobile phones past the machines and automatically paying by debit.

A bigger obstacle to the success of a project like C-Shirt in the US though might be cultural. People here at least think that we are each unique. Copying someone's t-shirt, even with alterations, might not appeal to many people in the US. I've even heard people ask why they would want to buy the most popular t-shirts on Rumplo, which is like Digg for shirts.

T-shirt Inspiration

Either way, the idea of C-shirt is totally cool just to think about. Had you ever considered such a possibility? I certainly hadn't. Maybe mobile wiki Creative Commons t-shirts could catch on all around the world! At the very least they are another example of innovation going on far from Silicon Valley.

If you're interested in reading more about web innovation in Asia, check out OpenWeb Asia, a project we wrote about yesterday.