Mashup Camp 3 Notes | January 19, 2007
by Jeb Boniakowski
I’m making my way home from Mashup Camp 3 and finally catching up with the various blog posts about it. I thought Mashup Camp was pretty awesome, and honestly, I was a little bit surprised by it. That hippie-sounding Open Space Technology stuff like “whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened,” while clearly not true, creates a sufficient anti-conference vibe that people really do have much higher-quality discussions. After attending another traditional conference last week which will remain nameless, I’m a big buyer of the whole “unconference” concept. Most of the people there were really smart and passionate and fun to talk to. However, my main takeaway is that Mashup Camp should split in two. More on that below the fold.
There were two more-or-less independent conversations going on at Mashup Camp. The dominant one was about showing off applications developers were able to build much more cheaply than tradition would have you believe by taking advantage of extant services with open APIs. Mashup bread and butter. This was the orientation of the “Best Mashup” contest and many of the sessions on themes like “monetizing your mashup.” Rails, the Gnarls Barkley of webapp frameworks, also had a packed session dedicated to itself in the last session of the last day, aka “ghost town time.” Who knew?
The second conversation was the one we were there to take part in, along with the IBM people and others. From the perspective of us and QEDWiki, this is about taking advantage of the same technologies that enable mashup developers to build these apps super fast and delivering that capability to a broader audience. Getting to talk to those guys face-to-face was great. They are interested in a lot of the same problems we are, but are coming at them from a different direction, so it was really interesting to compare notes.
Most of the post-(un)conference blogosphere talk has been about the actual mashups such as Hype Machine. While these were certainly cool, some of my favorite things haven’t been getting a lot of blog play, like the new Adobe technologies. Recall when Java first came out — before it was the enterprise web app language and associated with EJBs and stuff. The marketing hype was that Java would help create a universe of super-lightweight, cross-platform, web-distributed, tiny-footprint, web-enabled applications that had the GUI richness, offline capabilities, functionality and performance of rich client apps. Apollo is like that, except it might actually work. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from Adobe’s press department in the next couple of years than you’d care to, so I’ll leave it at that. What else… I learned the Mac portables’ conquest of the nerd-o-sphere, which started in earnest in 2000, is complete. Oh, and Angelwish was absolutely by far the coolest mashup, no one else even came close.
