Monday, January 22, 2007

And the winner is...


Remember the speed geeking post from Mashup Camp last week? I am now ready to reveal my favorite mashup. But first, the final FINAL results are in. The speed geeking winner of Mashup Camp 3 with 18 nickels is..... drum roll please..... The Hype Machine!

The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) combines music blog discussion, tracks, youtube video, concert and sales data to create a unique music discovery experience. (Powered by a healthy mix of Perl & PHP). Congratulations to Anthony Vlodkin - geek of the day.

My favorite? GBlinker by John Herren. gBlinker takes a Google blinky pin, interfaces it to a laptop via serial port, and uses a hacked a Gmail widget (using the Yahoo! widget engine) to make the pin blink when you get new mail.


Why is it my favorite? Simple, the big deal behind mashups is re-purposing. As creators of technology, you simply don't know exactly how it will be used in the real world. Mashups recognize this fact by a clear delineation between the service and the application. In Voice Over IP, I think that's been traditionally seen as a 'bad thing', as business models are hard to see in that environment. However, in the 'Internet World', there's apparently more of a willingness to throw caution to the wind. That's why this was my favorite mashup. That and, I suppose, the complete and sheer geekiness of this one was too much to ignore. Serial port hacking? Very nice.

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