end of mashup camp

Today was the last day of Mashup Camp in Dublin. Here is a quick summary of days 2 & 3 (from my perspective):

Day 2
The first half of the day was given to more presentations as part of "Mashup University". Although, many of the presentations are interesting (and some are very interesting) they start to drag a bit after a full day of presentations yesterday.

Mashup, SOA or RIA?
Martha Rotter from Microsoft kicked off the day with another go at some of her material that had been a casualty of the wireless network the previous day. We saw some more demos of mashups using Silverlight with more of an emphasis on social networking functionality. Martha also touched on codeplex.com: "Microsoft's open source project hosting web site".

As usual, everything coming out of Silverlight looked very slick and pretty, yet I found myself often wondering "is this really a mashup?". This would become a reoccurring theme for the rest of the conference.

AOL & LOL
Next, there were two presentations on APIs from AOL. The first was a very funny one, by John Herren, on AOLs XDrive storage API. (John isn't with AOL, he was just filling in). The presentation is available here.

After John, Stephen Benedict (who really is from AOL) talked about Open AIM. The goals are to allow users to build their own custom AIM clients as well as allow users to take bits of functionality from the AOL messenger and plug it into their web apps. Developers can also write their own bots and and plugins for the client and contribute them. This is cool stuff, an intd Stephen made the very good point that it allows start-up sites to automatically tap into the AOL community.

Also, Stephen demoed what AOL is calling WIMZI. Which is an embeddable IM window that the owner of a site can put on a page using a small amount of HTML. The IM window lets end users of the site message the owner directly, anonymously, and also while protecting the owner's identity. This is very similar to what Meebo has done.

The Mashups are coming...
The first day, I had noticed a number of large poster displays (like the kind you'd see in an actual conference) featuring close up shots of people who are half modern primitive / half corporate suits. The most prominent image was of some tough looking guy with full body tattoos and big honking posts in his ears wearing a button down shirt and tie (and cuff links!). On the top of the poster it reads: "The Mashups are coming. Unleash your inner developer." The whole display seemed incongruous with the spirit of Mashup Camp, and when Serena did their presentation it became clear that the guy in the suit had gone and gotten the tats to mix with the young crowd. Serena is a 20 something old mainframe company that has taken their workflow application and hooked into SOA on the backend and onto HTML on the frontend. Not that there is anything wrong with any of this. I proudly work for a company that goes all the way back to the 1800's and that is in the middle of reinventing itself right now. I just didn't see how this was a mashup. To quote Fight Club: "sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken", and I would say that calling Salesforce.com, while very nice, does not make you a mashup.

Kegerator
The last talk (that I can remember at least) was by Chad Dickerson, who is the director of the Yahoo Developer Network. He of course talked about the developer network and the great work they have been doing. Not just with APIs, Pipes, and YUI (as if that weren't enough), but with design patterns documentation and performance tunning recommendations and the YSlow plugin. If you are a web developer and haven't looked at Yahoo's Design Patterns and rules for Exception Performance, I strongly recommend you do. However, the biggest highlight of Chad's talk was his revelation that he is best known on the internet as a kegerator construction expert.

Geeking Out, Pubbing Out, and Install Hell
In the afternoon, we broke into discussion groups. The discussions and groups were participant lead and moderated, and are one of the hallmarks of the unconference. Unfortunately, at this point, I became caught in one of those installation/configuration hell's of a very deep level as the IBM team labored ceaselessly to determine what was wrong with my QEDWiki setup. About 36 hours and the tremendous help of Will, Flavio, and Dan (thanks again!) I now have QEDWiki running on my local machine -- just a little too late to enter the Mashup challenge.

The discussion I did get to participate in a bit was primarily around widget and service discoverability. The general consensus was that standards should adopted for metadata around widgets and services. While you can't really argue that this is a good idea, I do wonder what can really be implemented that will be practical, work for a wide enough range of situations, and that people will really use.

I am also not so sure that there is that much of a problem with discoverability to begin with. Or at least, a problem that wont be fixed with defacto standards coming out of particular business needs. Also, discovery is where the real value is in mashups, and where some of the key differentiation happens. If discovery were easy, we would have to come up with something else just as hard in order to compete. In other words, easily discovered data has little or no value. So, its nice to play around with, but nobody's going to build a business off of it.

The evening last night ended up in a couple of different pubs, in what was probably a relatively calm Sunday night out for many Dubliners. This morning, things got started a little late...

The Competition
The Competition was definitely one of the most exciting parts of Mashup Camp. After people had put together the mashups, speed geeking began, each mashup creator had 5 minutes to present their mashup to each observer. There was some interesting work done with QEDWiki (there was a QEDWiki mashup challenge as well as the Mashupcamp best mashup award being given - I helped judge for the QEDWiki challenge), and there were a number of mashups being done using mobile phones. The amount of mashup in the mashup varied from one (3rd prize) that very entertainingly made a game out of yahoo news headlines by substituting the terms in the headline with a result from a Yahoo image keyword search, (For example, "Bush Fires Staff" might show a picture of a shrub, a fire, and a big wooden stick, you then try to case what the actual headline is then click through to see the real headline and article.) to many that I would consider to be primarily standard web applications calling free services on the web rather then ones built from scratch. All in all, it was really impressive to see what people had done with very little time and (in some cases) very much beer.

Leaving Camp...
There was definitely a "leaving camp" feeling to leaving mashup camp that distinguishes it from other conferences. It's a nice feeling, and one that makes me reflect on how we can build a stronger development community where I work. I hope I can take some of these lessons back to Reuters.

Finally, as the mashup ecosystem develops I think its important that mashup doesn't become just another check mark to put on software and that it doesn't the term become become diluted to mean just calling a 3rd party service on the web. In my opinion, mashup implies some novelty of use where two (or more) incongruous objects are brought together in a way that creates a third. Or, it could be said this way: Mashups should be easy to build, but hard to conceive.