Mashup Camp: Achievement Review 2.0

At the congress of web developers Mashup Camp, which ended the other day in Boston, many interesting ideas were put forward again (the third time already), many interesting solutions were shown and it was clearly demonstrated that the web revolution was continuing and still gaining momentum.

The idea to hold a special informal exhibition-conference of developers working in the “mashup” genre appeared quite recently - in December 2005. And already after the first congress in February 2006, it became clear that the idea was justified.

The unusual format of the event, because of which it is even called “ not a conference”, is of interest in itself. The entire program of events (speeches, discussions, presentations, etc.) is formed in the morning on the first day of the exhibition by mutual agreement between the participants. No jury or strict administration, everything is decided by voting. As a result, the atmosphere here becomes very warm and friendly.
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“Mashup” is a mixture of the capabilities of various Internet services, software and various electronic devices into a single whole, which already has its own unique features. Fold your city map, blog search and mobile phone and see where flash mobs are scheduled to be held. Or something else, the space for the flight of fantasy here simply has no boundaries. But of particular value are not the ideas themselves, but their implementation in accordance with the principles of ease, clarity and convenience for the user.

Therefore, apart from friendly communication at seminars that any visitor to the exhibition can conduct, Mashup Camp also attracts participants with its competitions for the best mashup project, without any limitation on the subject matter and, perhaps, without any restrictions at all. Prizes to the winners are sponsored by large technology companies, such as Intel, for example.

This time, ProgrammableWeb and Gigul8tor from Eventful were among the most prominent at the exhibition, and Anthony Volodkin, The Hype Machine, deserved to be universally recognized the winner’s laurels.

The first one is an online mashup designer and gives you the opportunity to mix the functions of more than 300 different APIs in a couple of minutes. Eventful is focused on creating a connection between musicians and listeners - there you can always find out the place and time of the nearest performance of your favorite band, even if it is not very popular.

Hype Machine also works with music, but combines much more parts: tracking several of the most popular music blogs, this service displays on the main page the songs discussed in them, immediately putting down links to sources where you can listen to them, buy on CD or mp3 .

There is no doubt that the scale of Mashup Camp will grow. Similar meetings are already scheduled outside the US and interest from both the developer community and large companies is constantly increasing. And no wonder - everyone is already so tired of the term "Web 2.0" and the constant disputes about his fate that there was simply a need for a ventilator, where it was solely about the case.