Item. Thomas Hawk praises Cooliris as the coolest new way to see photos on Flickr.
Item. Mashable has list of six cool Twitter visualizations.
Item: Micah Wittman releases translation engine for FriendFeed.
It’s interesting that I’ve been to several conferences lately and one has really stuck out in my mind: 140: The Twitter Conference by the Parnassus Group. Why?
Out of all the conferences and events I’ve been to lately it was the one that had a lot of developers doing things that no one in the mainstream understands are important. I remember the last time I felt like that. 2000-2002. Right during the last downturn. What came out of that period? Oh, all sorts of blog tools and blog networks.
Jason Preston, who helps plan that conference, wrote why so much is happening around Twitter and notes that Facebook will never be the new Twitter because Facebook is “so damn worried about Twitter not because they want to be the hot new thing, but because they can’t let open, platform-level technologies siphon user activity out of their black hole.” I’m trying to get a writeup of all the Twitter services that were featured at the conference. It was quite a few.
Jason, it’s not just Twitter, either. There are rafts of interesting things going on because of open APIs. Have you ever used TripIt? I love TripIt. It uses APIs to hook up to other travel services to find me all sorts of stuff.
Or, since we’re talking about Travel (I’m headed to London on Saturday, so am interested in the topic), how about Offbeat Guides? You fill in your desination city and it uses a bunch of APIs to build you a travel book.
Don’t you love the new API world? I do. Got any cool API uses? Please leave them in the comments here for us all to check out.
Oh, and who is that picture of? It’s Alex Payne, API lead at Twitter, talking at that conference, I shot the picture. By the way, all my photos are in the public domain so you can use them without giving me credit or paying me.
Think of the power Alex now wields over a building infrastructure of API users. Even Flickr today joined the Twitter world.
Yeeeeehhaaaaaawwww!
