Born on the Web

I’m an avid public transportation user: train, bus, tube, … The only thing I hate is waiting too long for a train to come, or missing a train because you were seconds late.

This could be solved by a simple location based service. (I’m not completely sure, but I think both Mobistar and Proximus are already providing these kind of services, correct?) When you come close to a train station, say like in a range of 200m / 600m (you should be able to adjust this yourself). The service detects you are nearing a train station and simply sends you a message with the schedule for trains going to your home station. So a 100% push medium, which is triggered by your location. I wouldn’t mind paying like 50 cents per message, because it adds value. It let’s me know if I need to start running or can go grab a bite before catching my train.

But since the nmbs (belgium railway company) doesn’t even provide a mobile site. I’m guessing it’s going to take a while before seeing this kind of services …

I talked about this before, but if the NMBS would open up it’s train schedule database, a whole new range of services can exist:

• more services for the people who travel with the train, you make their lifes easier
• an extra business model if you charge for commercial use of the web service
• build an ecosystem around the brand NMBS

Really, somebody should wake them up … we live in the year 2008, not 1998. Damnit !!

Thanks to the native interoperability between google maps and flickr. I can now embed maps with recent geotagged flickr photos on it. Sweet huh! Making mashups has become easy... Photos from Leuven:
View Larger Map Photos from Brussels:
View Larger Map Photos from Gent:
View Larger Map Or even my personal geotagged photo map:
View Larger Map

I've always liked the way flickr build their URL's. Now that they just launched geoRSS feeds, it will show you how the URL of a service has become a kind of command line for that service.

The URL is structured in the following way:

flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/ countrycode / province or state / place

It will get clear if I give you some examples:

• http://www.flickr.com/service/feeds/geo/ will give you all geotagged photos from all over the world.
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/ will give you all geotagged photos from Belgium, (BE is the country code).
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/vlaams-brabant/ will give you all the photos from the province "Vlaams-Brabant "in Belgium.
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/vlaams-brabant/Meise will give you all the photos from a town called "Meise" in the province of Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium

Cool huh! But that's not all. Now surf to google maps and just copy past a flickr geoRSS(a click for the lazy people). It should display the images nicely on the map. This is what interoperability between to services is all about.

Great work !

I'm still looking for a good way to divide me posting over here and at my employers' blog i-wisdom. It's seems so stupid to cross post it. I think a lot of readers over here, read i-wisdom to? not? Anyway, here the link to my article about geotagging photos on flickr. Over here I do have the tendency to post more about techy related topics. Maybe it's good I can keep this blog for my geek side.

I wanted to post this a while ago, but never came to it. During the world cup this year we held a small competition at Pickdee. Gary from Pickdee mailed me last week with a nice new feature he implemented:

Gary from Pickdee here, hope you're enjoying the football. I just came across your post on pickdee [ after having being introduced to your blog from the pickdee post ] -- I also thought the facebook API opening up was an interesting event. It's definitely of a different nature than most of the other web API's. It let me build this: http://www.pickdee.com/facebook/ in pretty short order, it lets any facebook user use their login there to authenticate with pickdee and play one of the two new American Football games... Funny seeing your two posts together.

A lot of mashup kids like Gary (from Pickdee) and me (sometimes) clearly see the advantage of building further upon existing services. He plugs his system into facebook, he doesn't have to make a registration page, although he already made one now. The value of a facebook account goes up because you can use it in Pickdee. The web is evolving to a nice ecosystem, where every platform has its specific task and focuses on doing that specific task very good.

Everytime I see a site opening up their API for the public I feel my programming fingers tingling. It just gives a simple developer so much really cool data to play with. Most of the time I can't wait to make something cool with it or at least test it out. Facebook (the second biggest social network in the US) just opened its API and even I'm not a member of Facebook and I don't know anyone who has a Facebook account, but I can't wait to test it out. The value of personal data is very interesting to experiment with. From the moment a web platform decides to open up it's API it decides to add value to the network its located on: The internet. Every API added to the web, gives every developers with internet access an extra ready made tool to use. It fits perfectly in the ecosystem of the web: Companies use the internet as network to reach their customers/members, they give something back to the network in the form of opening its data source to the public. There is however a downside of the story. Most public web services are only for non-commercial use and they don't provide any guarantee of access to the service. If you want to use a public service in your own tool, it is a bit sensitive because you are partly dependent of the provider of the web service you use. I think this slows down a lot of new innovations on the web. Web service providers need to provide a paid plan without restrictions, which gives other companies the possibility to commercially use their data. This can guarantee access to the service and will diminish the fear of using external data in your own platform. Of course the paid plan is only to ensure access, if you want fast innovation you also need a open free web service for your developers to play with. A very good example of this, is the use of Amazon's Simple Storage Service. If we can evolve to a model for commercial use of APIs, we'll see a boost of new mashup services. The way we look at building web platforms will fundamentally change. Fast innovation will not mean, fast development. Fast innovation will mean using the right web services and integrating them flawlessly in your own web platform. Mashup kids like me can't wait to see the web evolving in a faster innovating network. Rapid development, easy deployment. Update: Yesterday the facebook API opened up, today the Facebook Friend Mapper. This is what I call fast innovation. Links:

• List of available apis
• Smugsmug: a photo sharing service completely build upon amazon S3