Intrinsitivity

Last week, I caught the API bug in which I have become fascinated by APIs and mashups of all kinds. Although I know that I have only scratched the surface of what is possible, I have managed to create a couple of apps using APIs and one also falls under the esteemed category of being my first mashup. The first app I created this past Friday (2/20) is called 10 Twitter Trends. You can read more about it in a previous post.

The second app, which is also the mashup, is a Facebook app and Facebook Connect (i.e., offsite) app called funfriendfotos. This app lets Facebook users edit their friends’ profile photos using Picnik, the photo editing service that Flickr uses. The idea was twofold: to see what I could do with Facebook’s API and, along with that, to create my first mashup. I chose Picnik because it does not allow a user to go crazy with a photo, but mostly to edit a photo’s qualities, like hue and saturation.

I could create a Facebook app that lets users edit their own photos and then upload their results back to Facebook, but that would certainly be very popular and would probably bring down my website’s server. I doubt funfriendfotos will get that much attention. I hope not, anyway.

But it was fun to make!

Vint Cerf: We Still Have 80 Per Cent of the World to Connect

“By 2010 we will have run out of IP addresses if we don’t do something about it,” Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and the man commonly referred to as “the father of the Internet,” told RWW last month.

I have been addicted to Twitter since last weekend, having found several applications that enhance Twitter’s core functionality and add value to it, like TweetDeck. One column of data in TweetDeck is filled with the latest trends on Twitter as provided by both Twitter’s own API and Twitscoop.com. This is a great feature of TweetDeck, since it puts Twitter users on the pulse of the Twitter community and, by extension, the whole wide wired world.

One problem I quickly found, however, is that I am sometimes not aware of what each trendy term means. For example, as of now, a trendy term is #lyt. I have no idea what this means other than it probably being an acronym for something.

To ease the path to enlightenment, I wrote a jQuery script that pulls trends from Twitter in JSON format and links each trendy term to four sources, Twitter’s own search feature, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and a Google definition search. I call it 10 Twitter Trends.