New Tools For The 3pointD Generation
Two new applications out recently — Yahoo! Pipes and IBM’s QEDWiki — contain much promise for the 3pointD world. They’re basically mashupmakers (mashuppers? mashers?), GUI-based systems that let you create your own mashups without having to get too deep into code. They’re still a bit beyond my ability to really check out without spending a whole day on them, but they definitely make mashupping (I’m going with “mashupping” for the moment) available to a broader set of users. What does this mean for the 3pointD generation? More mashups, of course. But more importantly, it means greater, more widespread power to make the virtual world a more useful place.
Though it wasn’t made in Pipes, the Google Earth blog flags a mashup that’s a case in point: Jeff Crouse, who’s working with our friends over at Eyebeam, has made something called Earthify, which puts a button on your browser toolbar that lets you automatically map a Craigslist page in Google Earth. All you have to do is navigate to the page you want to map, hit the Earthify button, wait a minute, and presto, those results are displayed in Google Earth.
The GE blog has blogged this in relation to Pipes (and I’m reblogging it now) because this is just the kind of thing that Pipes and QEDWiki will make much easier. It’s also part of what I’ve blathered about in the past when describing the “3pointD generation.” This is a generation that will not only be more immersed than we can imagine in the use of virtual worlds as tools to enhance their offline lives, but it will be a generation that will have at their disposal more tools with which to create those tools. If there’s nothing that does what you want right off the shelf, you’ll be able to cobble the function together yourself. Not everyone will do this, of course, but more people will do it than ever before.
Tool-making tools like Pipes, QEDWiki, WyaCracker, Zoho Creator and others are democratizing the already quite democratized world of mashupping. As these mashups begin to incorporate 3pointD applications like Google Earth, Second Life or even massively multiplayer online games, the power of the 3pointD world will grow accordingly — just as the power of the Web has grown with the advent of Web 2.0 mashups that didn’t require such tools.
The future will be very cool, no doubt about it.
Feeds
All i can say is IBM’s QEDWiki looks kinda badass ;0
[…] Once again 3pointd has found something interesting. This time we do have a bit of a headsup on this. QEDWiki is a situational application building tool. The basic premise is to use the principles of a Wiki but allowing people to pull in services and feeds as part of the wiki. The wiki approach lets people pull together a mashup and then share it with others. In a business context the aim is to do the same thing as tends to happen with shared spreadsheets. Business people often are happy to build a spreadsheet with some business information pasted in then share that with collegues. To many of us this is Web 2.0 mentality anyway, it is a natural rearranging of data and sharing of data. Now remove the cut and paste of the data, make it a live feed, place it in a Web 2.0 browser context and you have a situational application builder. In many of the Web 2.0 presentations we do we have been explaining QEDWiki and alike for the past year as it comes out of the Emerging Technology organization that serveral of the Hursley eightbar crew are part of or have been part of. One conversation point is usually around the reliability of the feeds and mashup sources that a business user may pull together. What happens when in meeting the requirement for a business problem the mashup becomes so important that it is a business critical system? (it is going to happen) What happens if a public feed, a mapping system for example, is no longer is available? These are very valid points, but I regard the mashup as a very quick way to solve an immediate problem and protoype things that, then need to be hardened into a business application. It is much better than an esoteric design document that is full of theory. I have often related Second Life to a mashup application too. Its ability to absorb feeds and data from the web, and to share in real time with other users fits the same model. […]