APIs and ‘Mashups”
API (or application programming interface ) is pretty darn cool. They are a way of getting access to, and sharing, certain data. Now, the ability to be able to do this is great, but what some people have acheived through doing this is awesome. One site that I think is well worth a visit is Neave.com .. The Interactive Playground of Paul Neave, especially the ‘television’ section.
Another thing we learnt about this week was “Mashups”. Now, I think wikipedia does a much better job of explaning this concept. Wikipedia states that mashups are “a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video and animation drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work”
An example of this would be the creation of an online gallery which would take photos from Flickr, display them using a google maps interface and perhaps combine those photos with comments taken from the authors Twitter feed. Has some pretty amazing potentials, which you can explore yourself with “Yahoo Tubes”
Peace!
