1.30.2006

Programmable Web Marginalizes OS

For many of us, mashups first appeared when we saw San Francisco Bay area apartment listings or Chicago crime sites superimposed over Google maps. Now, they're multiplying like Star Trek's Tribbles. See www.programmableweb.com/mashups and www.mashupfeed.com/. If you'd like to stop, kick back, and have a beer to think about all this, start here: beermapping.com/maps/sanfranbeer.html/.

For a big-picture, industry view see: blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2484 and poke around www.programmableweb.com/

With 'mashups' all the rage these days, taking a few moments to explore and ponder the API matrix (www.programmableweb.com/matrix) makes a few things clear. In simple terms, the matrix shows mashups as exemplars of combinations of various web service APIs, such as Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Web services are being interconnected via their own APIs via the Internet. This isn't the traditional notion of 'program' APIs communicating, but services out there in the ether dwelling on servers who knows where. A Web 2.0 blogging group posts at www.web20workgroup.com and innovations are distributed, mapped at www.fourio.com/web20map/.

These nerd bits are exciting! As innovators build out more services based on web APIs, the underlying platform's operating system shrinks in importance, asymptotically approaching irrelevance. The browser is the platform for web services. Netscape was right!

Communities are forming; developers are camping: www.mashupcamp.com/

It's happening here. It's happening now.
Watch the skies. And screens.

How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm?

True friends' messages encourage action. Between the Blue Oxen Catalyst event, and Engelbart's 81st birthday party today at Stanford, one message came through loud and clear from my friends and colleagues: "You've gotta get out more; you've become a hermit. And blog -- you've gotta blog."

In retrospect, of course they're right. The time demands over the last several years has been immense, but there's a richness to my personal life that happily lures my discretionary moments. And I write so much through my day job, that writing/blogging has no power to entice my hands when a synthesizer and guitar are in the same room.

So, OK. Time to start getting out more. And blogging, occassionally.

Thank you, friends. Camaradarie trumps solo pursuits. At least most times.

Year of the Dog

All too often in "workshop" gatherings, governance issues emerge as a centroid of discourse. They still remain to learn that a more than 'few parts per million' of process and authority will spoil the soup.

It's the year of the Dog.
http://sunarcher.org/pix/whippets.jpg
Happy New Year.