Mashup Camp 2 Day 2: Speed geeking

Decision time. I have one wooden nickel to spend, and five mashups that I really like:

• ChunkLove, a gift registry finder that was created when the author’s sister complained that she had a number of friends getting married and no way to track all the different stores where they were registered for gifts. You enter a first/last name and city, and ChunkLove searches a number of pre-set registries (Pottery Barn, Bloomingdales, etc.) to see if that person exists in their registry. Right now, you can then click on each of the stores to link through to the name search results, but the plan for the future is to bring the search results back to the main ChunkLove page so that you can identify which Jane Smith it is whose wedding that you’re attending, for example. Only Amazon has APIs to get the search results, so the rest of them are accessed via scraping — the author was looking for a “more interesting” Ruby project to do, so took on the scraping task as well as all the other mashup essentials. He has other plans to use wedding date to narrow the search further, and aggregate the content (i.e., the actual items listed in the registry) so that you could see, for example, if Jane had asked for the same item on more than one site, and if it were already purchased on one of the sites.
• TrPPR was whipped up by Cameron Jones in 4-5 hours starting at 11 last night, after he was inspired by all the other speed geekers’ offerings yesterday. It’s a mashup of NPR data with Microsoft maps that allows you to select a driving route by its endpoints, then see all the NPR radio coverage that you will have along the route. He scrapes the XML data from the NPR site, then uses PHP to calculate coverage radii. He then overlays the tower locations and coverage areas on the map route, and provides links from each tower to the corresponding radio station so that you can make a donation to support public radio.
• PhoTiger by Chris Radcliff matches your Flickr photos with your Eventful events to automatically add tags, including geolocation tags, to the photos and change their titles based on the event data. Since the photo data uploaded to Flickr includes when the photo was taken, PhoTiger can match that against where you were at that time according to your Eventful calendar. It displays the photos matching each event and allows you to select/deselect appropriate photos, deselect any of the suggested tags, and select whether to override the photo name to match the event name. This mashup has actually evolved since yesterday to add the geolocation tags and photo titles, which says a lot about what Chris does in his spare time.
• MileGuru, which aggregates all your frequent flyer and frequent stayer (hotel) points and other data into a single place. Since I saw the mashup yesterday, Chad integrated in mapping, so that all of your travel route details show up plotted on a Google map. He’s promised to get me on the beta as soon as it opens, in part so that I can beat up the Air Canada section, and I can abandon that Excel spreadsheet that I’m using to track this now. He’s currently using Google AdSense on the site to generate some revenue (or at least, it will when he releases this publicly), but he also plans to place targetted ads based on your frequent flyer content, that is, where you’ve been travelling lately.
• WeatherBonk is a mashup that I first saw at the first Mashup Camp in February, and I checked out how it has advanced in the last several months. The author spent about four months creating the “Bonk” mashup framework, mostly on top of the Google APIs, and can now create new vertical mashups much more easily, such as GolfBonk and SkiBonk. WeatherBonk shows a map of the San Francisco area with temperature bubbles directly on the map (there’s a lot of variation in the Bay area, and you can really see it here), plus a ton of webcams accessible directly from their location on the map. You can overlay live fog layer data, or see traffic speeds and traffic cams instead. For other geographic areas, you can plot a route on the map and see the expected weather conditions along the route in case you want to adjust your departure date. You can also look at historical temperature data for many other international locations.

WeatherBonk is definitely the most sophisticated, but then, he’s been working on it since before Mashup Camp 1. From a pure consumer “oh my god, I want to use that” standpoint, my nickel goes to MileGuru.