I found two YouTube videos which helped me to further understand what mashups and APIs are: the first has a lot of technical language (which went a bit over my head) but it illustrates how the people who use APIs for data exchange with other sites (like Amazon.com and YouTube) can use this to make money from people who use these applications (e.g. a search) through their site.
The second video is from YouTube itself, and shows the viewer how to create data and player APIs on your website. It turns out that the video bar added to my site is a type of data API! Another type of data API would be having a search function for YouTube videos on your site, or a way to upload data from your site to YouTube. I used the player API function to make the ‘skin’ of the player match the green colour scheme of my blog.
According to Programmable Web I already use a mashup in the form of my Facebook profile. This mashup has become very useful to me because I can link to my favourite YouTube videos through the ‘box’ I recently created on my profile, and I am discovering many other ways to add data to my profile from external sources. The Programmable Web article http://www.programmableweb.com/api/facebook/mashups has a list of the applications available through Facebook which can be added on to your profile page, and thus create a mashup. I searched through the applications available from my own account on Facebook and even found one called ‘flickr2facebook’ which is a bookmarklet that can add a Flickr photo straight into your Facebook album. I think that mashups are valuable tools for web users because it makes data available to access in one place, even if the data is from multiple sources.
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hey loretta,
ReplyDeletethanks for the information on mashups because I still do not understand what it is. Hopefully we will get to look at it further in class otherwise I will have to browse the web for anymore information there is which I am sure is a lot.
I love the slideshow, your cat is so cute. I just absolutely love them and don't know what I do without my cat.
anyways going off topic a bit. Have you had a chance to have a look at Google maps yet? I am hoping to explore that today but that also looks like it could be interesting. Let me know how you go?
candy
Hi Candy,
ReplyDeleteYes, I am definitely a cat person...they are the best. Back on topic though, 'mashups' was a rather confusing concept because I thought it sounded like something new and different. However, it turns out we use them all the time whenever we create a resource which is like a collage of all our frequently used info/applications in one place.
You seemed to have (recently) a good go at using Google Maps, there are a few features that I have yet to work out (e.g. trouble with drawing a line), but I'll get there!