Archive for October, 2009
The ol’ mid-date excuse to cut things short has an upgrade from a new mashup. Escape My Date reacts to a Twitter message for help and dispatches pre-selected friends to call you. The excuse, it seems, is still up to you to figure out.
The site received the most votes of the companies created at Women 2.0 Startup Weekend in San Francisco at the end of August. When signing up, you select some friends to help you. The site gives you some ideas, which appear to be based on recent direct messages you have received.
When you’re ready to escape, you send a direct message to the site’s Twitter account. Then Escape My Date sends direct messages to your selected friends, asking for a little help. If your friends keep a contstant ear on Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ll receive a phone call from one of them. Otherwise, the site will use Twilio (our Twilio API profile) to automate the phone call after five minutes.
Again, once the call comes in, you still have to give your date an excuse. The site’s blog lists some ideas.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)
The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.
The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.
Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.
The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.
But where are they heading?
The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.
But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.
Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.
When Yahoo! decided to close down GeoCities, a lot of us shed a single tear for our first home on the Internet and moved on. For one man called Jacques, though, that wasn’t good enough.
He took it upon himself to save as much of GeoCities as possible, by writing scripts that pinged the site to find active pages, and then downloaded them to his personal storage space. The one-man project, called Reocities, rescued an estimated 600,000 GeoCities sites before the big shutdown.
The six-day project started with just the SiliconValley neighborhood of GeoCities, but after a quick trip to Wikipedia, Jacques found a list of all the other neighborhoods on the site, and decided to save them all.
That’s a heck of a lot of data, even at the 10mb/sec download speed he was getting. If you want to find out more about this…err…heroic endeavor, The Reocities “Making Of” page details the adventure and the setup that saved a big chunk of GeoCities.
[via Mashable]
Reocities: because Geocities is gone, but not forgotten originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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MapQuest continues to add services to its developer network. Have they caught up with the geo-tools available from Google and Yahoo?
Most recently the mapping pioneer released a geocoding web service and static maps. In fact, many recent posts on its developer blog have included multiple announcements, testament to how much the company has been releasing.
The geocoding web service converts addresses to latitude and longitude points, an important step to create maps on your website. MapQuest (our MapQuest API profile) uses a REST interface, rather than only making the geocoder available via JavaScript (a service it also has). That means that developers can geocode from the server, a mobile application, or anywhere else. Google and Yahoo also have both web services and JavaScript versions of their geocoders.
Static maps provide developers with an image of a map, rather than a fully interactive interface. MapQuest joins Google as the only two providers to have a static option. In fact, the search giant recently upgraded its static maps API to be able to display lines (often used to show directions). MapQuest’s features are similar to Google’s new version.
Plus, MapQuest provides pre-generated static maps for each step of directions. This bit of mappery combines the new static API with its innovative directions web service. When it comes to providing full access to directions data, MapQuest still stands alone.
There are other ways that Google and Yahoo have a lead over MapQuest as a platform. Google is the most popular, of course, and has Street View. No other service is likely to even attempt to take 360 degree photos of every street. Yahoo has several services to help with geocoding, such as Placemaker (our Placemaker API profile).
MapQuest, which lead the way for years for online directions, is now showing its might through its developer network. It is doing a bit of leading and a lot less following. It’s now a platform worth considering, right along with Google and Yahoo.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Web services
There’s a lot to love about the Pandora streaming music service. If you put together just the right combination of musical ingredients, you’ve got the modern-day equivalent of the perfect mixtape. Sending your brilliant Pandora station to a friend or 2 (or 200!) just got easier, with the addition of Facebook and Twitter sharing.
Until now, the only option for sharing your streaming radio stations was email. That feature is still around, including personalized “Station Gifting,” which is a bit like a Pandora e-card. Twitter and Facebook sharing work with single songs or whole stations, and they place a link (along with any comments you want to add) into your public feed. Unfortunately, you still can’t use these features to share with an individual friend via direct message, so you’ll have to stick to email sharing for that.
[via CNET]
Pandora finally gets social sharing, via Facebook and Twitter originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Jigsaw, has announced additions to their RESTful JSON and XML API as well as a developer program designed to enable developers to query, share, and resell Jigsaw’s community-contributed database of company data and contact information. They came onto the API scene in June 2008 with their declaration of “Data Independence Day“, which focused on providing free access to their database of company information (more details at our Jigsaw API Profile).
This round of API additions adds support for premium transactions such as requesting lists of contact information. Because Jigsaw requires payment for such contact requests, their API now includes the ability for an application developer to pay on their own and pass on the cost or to make requests using the end-user’s own Jigsaw account.
Disappointingly, for the latter behavior, Jigsaw chose to require applications to pass in a username and password as part of each request instead of using a delegated authorization protocol such as the widely used OAuth standard.
They signed up an impressive 17 companies as launch partners for the new Developer Program, with the well-known SugarCRM topping the list. Two of these have been added to our mashup directory, including ChatStat and VisiStat. ChatStat, shown below, is “live chat software that companies use to connect directly with their customers and prospects” and by embedding the Jigsaw API, ChatStat gives name, title, company, and contact details for site visitors at the beginning of every chat (more at our ChatStat mashup profile). And VisiStat is a realtime web analytics service that uses the Jigsaw API for LeadCaster, a suite of realtime tools that include the ability to identify companies that visit a website and get their business address, phone numbers, email addresses, and other details (details at our VisiStat profile).
Jigsaw’s juggernaut competitor, Hoover’s, has a very similar API. The Hoover’s API is SOAP-based, which Jigsaw doesn’t hesitate to contrast themselves against. They quote Andy Gross, VP of Engineering for launch partner Basho, as saying “By embracing HTTP and standard data formats like JSON, Jigsaw’s API enables much deeper and richer integrations at a fraction of the cost. Our client code was less than a fifth of the size of similar SOAP-based services.”
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Microsoft has made another play at interoperability with a key open source software offering.
At Eclipse Summit Europe on Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash. software giant announced that it is working on four open source projects with two open source companies — Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec — to enable Eclipse users to develop on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight.
TaskTop, of Canada, will provide enhancements to the Eclipse IDE in the first quarter of 2010, according to Microsoft’s interoperability blog.
“Microsoft and Tasktop will collaborate to extend the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), and in particular the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), to include the mapping of new features offered by Windows 7,” the blog reports. “This will allow Eclipse developers to take advantage of the new user interface features offered by Windows 7, directly from the Eclipse IDE and from any desktop applications built on top of the Eclipse platform.”
Microsoft also announced that partner Soyatec of France will develop Java and PHP interoperability tools for Eclipse that will enable development on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform and with Microsoft’s Silverlight IDE.
From the press release issued today, Soyatec will provide:
- Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, a new open source plug-in that will enable PHP developers using Eclipse to create web applications targeting Windows Azure.
- Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java, an open source project that consists of tools and resources to help bridge Java developers to Windows Azure.
- Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, the release of version 1.0 of the Eclipse Silverlight plug-in, an open source, cross-platform plug-in for the Eclipse development environment that enables Eclipse developers to build Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and includes support for the Macintosh platform. The plug-in provides guidance for greater interoperability between Silverlight-based applications and Java-based web sites and web services, including REST, SOAP, JSON and other standards.
Filed under: Social Software, iPhone
Well, at least they’re honest about what they do. A new iPhone app called Stalqer helps you locate your friends, even if they’re not signed up for your favorite location-based service – like Google Latitude, Foursquare or Loopt. Users who opt-in to Stalqer ping the service with their location every time their phones check for email, which gives nearly real-time updates on the iPhone (which can’t keep an application like FourSquare open in the background). That part is only slightly creepy. The creepier part is that Stalqer tracks friends who aren’t even using the service.
By pulling info from friends’ Facebook locations, the app can give you a general idea of where people are. It can’t yet read status messages and wall posts to look for location info, but it reported does a fair good job of finding people without that capability. The app does have SOME privacy features: it won’t let you track people who you haven’t added as contacts in your phone’s address book. That’s pretty easy to get around, though: just add the person you’re looking for.
As far as what information you share through Stalqer, you can control how precisely you’re located and also turn reporting on and off. If you only want to show some friends which city you’re in, and not the street address, you can create a group and change your privacy settings to allow for that. It sounds like Stalqer is trying to build the kind of app that everyone wishes exists, but nobody admits they want. Where do I sign up?
[via CNET]
Stalqer iPhone app finds people, whether they sign up or not originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Like many of you, I awoke Monday to read that whitehouse.gov was now running on open source products, including Drupal, Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, MySQL, and Apache Solr.
Filed under: Photo, Web services, Google, Search
Google Labs has been putting together some great new search technology lately. They just introduced Social Search, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search. When you search for an image, you’ll see “find similar images” links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.
I tested out similar images on some easy stuff (umbrellas) and some tougher stuff (celebrities), and found that it worked really well. Similar Images is good at matching backgrounds, and even manages to find similarly-posed photos if you’re searching for an animal or a person. It obviously doesn’t do as well when the subject is obscure or abstract, or there aren’t a lot of photos of it in the database. In cases like that, it’ll be more likely to match your image’s color scheme than to find a picture of the same person or thing.
Similar Images isn’t made to find identical images hosted on different sites. If you’re trying to determine where an image came from, try putting it into TinEye instead.
Similar Images feature emerges from Google Labs originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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